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Losing Google Would Hit Chinese Science Hard
An anonymous reader writes to share recent statements by Chinese scientists that indicate troubled waters ahead if Google were to pull out of China. "More than three-quarters of scientists in China use the search engine Google as a primary research tool and say their work would be significantly hampered if they were to lose it, a survey showed on Wednesday. In the survey, 84 percent said losing Google would 'somewhat or significantly' hamper their research and 78 percent said international collaborations would be affected. 'Research without Google would be like life without electricity,' one Chinese scientist said in the survey, which asked more than 700 scientists for their views."
With all of the "free trade" efforts leading to "We'll take your jobs, thanks," maybe this is something we should inflict on China.
And by 'we' I assume you mean Google.
How often would you say you pay more for something than you have to?
What's going on when somebody in China is allowed to ask 700 people of any kind about any political issue? Isn't that close to that "voting" thing their leaders are afraid of?
Knife without a spoon! iPhone without a charger!
Velcro without laces! TV without a remote!
Paper without a pencil! PC without Windows!
China without IP violations! Avocado without a pit!
CD without R *or* W! Keyboard without a PS/2 adapter!
Jacket without a tie! Slashdot without really great posts!
Get your own, you fucking thieves.
So, how long, then, until we see the govt "encouraging" Google to get out of China for national security reasons?
It's an American controlled company, so yes it would be more accurate to say a subset of Americans should deny a subset of Chinese their service.
Semantics aside, google would be better off threatening the Chinese to remove their search access than to actualyl do it. Nothing is stopping the Chinese from building their own search engine.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
When somebody is breaking the rules/laws in order to get there, they shouldn't be allowed to present their product on the marketplace.
Then I support Google leaving China.
So, who wants to start up a fundraiser to pay Google to shut down operations in China?
I was under the impression that Baidu had significantly more market share already. Is there something that Google does particularly well for research that Baidu doesn't? Is it something Baidu would find difficult to replicate?
TFA doesn't even mention Baidu, though the first comment declares it "pretty lame" (with no support that assertion).
Google is a remarkable company and a remarkable search engine, but it shouldn't be that hard for other engines to provide at least a facsimile of what it does in the search area.
My initial reaction to this was "what, they don't have other search engines on the Internet?" I mean, I use Google myself, and I'm quite happy with it, but if it disappeared tomorrow I'd just start using something else.
Then I (gasp!) read TFA, which I know many (most?) of you won't do, so I'll fill you in on the part that the summary missed. The issue here isn't so much that they fear losing Google, but that they fear losing Google Scholar, which, as far as I can tell (although I've never used it), has no free (as in beer) alternatives.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Why would Google have to be IN China for the "scientists" to use it as a search engine?
Just because Google has no offices or data centers in China would not mean it would be unavailable there.
Censored perhaps, but how difficult would it be for "Scientists" to get around that, or be exempted from it?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yay for trade with China, keeps our relationship stable. But, why oh why do we need to supply material support beyond the bare minimum to our ideological enemy??
China often threatens and does replace google.cn with Baidu's site. The thing is, Baidu is not as good of a search as Google, so users would rather see Google.
When somebody is giving you a silly punishment for what you're doing that annoys them... coming up with a way to live with that punishment in place and still do what you want is a great way to frustrate your oppressor.
Nothing is stopping the Chinese from building their own search engine.
ummm, Baidu?
Link is to an article that does not name who did the "survey." For all we know the whole thing was made up.
Count me in. Where I send money?
Right, because as an American you're entitled to a job even if you do it less efficiently than someone else. Is that about it?
Link is to an article that does not name who did the "survey." For all we know the whole thing was made up.
I believe the Science journal Nature did the survey. Here's the original article and a breakdown of the survey. Sample size looked to be 784.
My work here is dung.
I would to stop it here as well. One less crap on the internet spoofing on what we do.
I'm sure MS would be happy the facilitate researcher's needs and soak up some of their intellectual talent. Also, I'm not sure how publications are are provided in China, but in the US there are a number of databases targeted towards a specific scientific domain: ACM, iEEE, Medline, etc. So, instead of doing "google: well known database" one would have to be a little less lazy and go "url: well known database" and search for their topic.
On the other hand, if these researchers are looking up google translated publications (even with the flaws involved), I can see how that might hurt them significantly. Having access to the world's research would definitely be better than having access to just one country.
Couldn't the scientists just switch to bing? It's rising in popularity.. :)
No, it's because corporations are entitled to do business even if it kills their employees and they dump PCB's into the water.
What the fuck does a society even exist for if not to provide for its mutual defense from people would would poison them?
They have their own search engines (Baidu), but Google is significant because it would impact *international collaboration*. This would be bad for all involved.
how is babby formed?
More Chinese users use Baidu than Google. It's not an issue of better or worse, it's an issue of focus. Baidu is sino-centric, which for most Chinese is a positive thing, because most users infrequently need international information. However, Chinese scientists need international information all the time, so for them Google makes more sense.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
no, we're allowed to demand a higher salary while we're at it.
Count me in. Where I send money?
Please send $1 to 'Happy Dude', 742 Evergreen Terrace ...
... that Google indexed the world's corporate and trade secrets.
Homer: If I want lead in my toys I'll add it myself, thank you very much.
Why it's the AT-5000 Auto-Dialer. My very first patent. Aw, would you listen to the gibberish they've got you saying, it's sad and alarming. You were designed to alert schoolchildren about snow days and such. Well, let's get you home to Frinky. Hope your wheels still work, bw-hey!
bomb the us up set someone
Losing Google Would Hit Chinese Reverse Engineering Hard
FTfY
Funny thing: our schools are packed with Chinese students and profs.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
More than three-quarters of scientists... say their work would be significantly hampered
84 percent said losing Google would 'somewhat or significantly' hamper their research
Typical example of a survey designed to produce the desired results.
Can't they use Bing or another search engine ? Google isn't the only thing out there that is international.
How about we also commission Google to shutdown services wherever we feel science and technology growth threatens our national security?
No more Iranian Google results for "How to build a nuclear bomb"
How will they steel technologies now? :) no plagiarism ? come on!
Parent is not 'trolling'. GP is a Simpsons reference and parent is a Simpsons reply.
That was supposed to end with </ bitter ot we no longer have a manned space program rant>
If they don't want to hire citizens here, they can incorporate somewhere else.
Microsoft has tried and not managed to equal google. It's not so easy.
Not to mention, if Google pulls out, China would have a more difficult time to steal their IP to build
a comparable search engine.
I'm only half-kidding
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
My initial reaction to this was "what, they don't have other search engines on the Internet?" I mean, I use Google myself, and I'm quite happy with it, but if it disappeared tomorrow I'd just start using something else.
My initial reaction was, "what, China actually conducts its own research rather than steal it?!?!?!"
But that is an unfair generalization. As I thought about it more carefully I realized that of course China does its own research. It is after all, a world leader in industrial espionage, miniature camera technology, and software security. You don't get to the front of such competitive fields without doing a LOT of research in them...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
"who on Earth will be making any progress?"
The Russians. How else are they going to keep the ISS supplied.
"I'm an optimist. I want to find a way to work within the Chinese system and provide more and better information. I think a lot of people think I'm naive, and that may be true."
Sergey went on to say, "Look, I grew up in Soviet Union. I know authoritarian communist regimes. Let me tell you, falling all over yourself in order to please their every whim and enabling them to maintain their stranglehold on power isn't evil. It's actually good. Good for business that is! Ha! Ha! I kid. Nah. I'm serious."
Sorry, but loosing google in china may improve the quality of the research if that data is true. What I say is that google, or google scholar is not the best way to search for published works (e.g. there are few and limited options to do search and order results, there is no information of what is and what is not indexed, etc.). Ok, it is not all bad. It is free. Thinking twice this would mean that Chinese researchers will use another search mechanism that may be much more adequate for the purpose.
International Bing is complete crap, even here in the EU. It falls so much for SEO and linkfarms and spam it's not even funny. A few months back in one of the Google vs Bing discussions I posted an analysis showing just how terribly bad it was, and after some investigation by others it turned out it was a lot better from the US. It looks like Bing is only worth considering if you live on the other side of the pond.
Back in '96 I took a social psych class. If you're not familiar, the one sentence reductionist oversimplified explanation of the core theories of social psych is that people are influenced by the talk around them.
One of the (somewhat prophetic?) things I remember my professor talking about was the struggle between freedom of information and scholarship in China. In his view, China either had to choose to shut out internet access to the rest of the world (in which case their scholars would be significantly handicapped relative to everyone else) or allow it (in which case the Chinese people would become more influenced by the ideas of the rest of the world than they had been in the recent past.) The Great Firewall of China being something of a halfway measure that either didn't exist in those days or we didn't know about.
Along similar lines, he liked to say that a decent number of students had come from China to study at our school of Engineering, and that despite anyone's best efforts to focus them on purely scholastic matters, they would go home forever changed by having lived in a country with Steak and Shake.
It's interesting to see this tension at work still as there's talk of Google pulling out of China.
How about we also commission Google to shutdown services wherever we feel science and technology growth threatens our national security?
Unfortunately, that would also shut down the kind of communication which would be needed to encourage those places to stop being a threat to our national security.
Essentially, we can't keep people from being able to build nukes. It's a fundamental property of the Universe that matter can be converted to energy, and the design is obvious enough. The best we can do is try to keep the raw materials out of reach of the actual lunatics, and try to persuade the general population to play nice with us.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Chinese "research", eh?
I wonder how much of that research is "find places to steal information from and use it". Seems we've had a fair number of news articles lately about Chinese espionage, and it doesn't take much imagination to see that a lot of the "new" things from China are actually reverse engineered Western items.
Without effective search, I suspect all the shops in China making Apple product knockoffs would be hard pressed to bring products to market. Likewise for many other industries.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
They've been stealing our tech for so long, they deserve it.
"Men willingly believe what they wish." - Julius Caesar
I always use isiknowledge.com, which isn't free but my university has a subscription. Scholar is quiet limited in filtering search results imho compared to isi, for example afaik you can't filter for type (review, opinion, article) and you don't have a list of publishers you can use to refine search results. And you can't even sort by publication date or number of citations.
I'd rather pay them to change all the results to
"Did you mean Tiananmen Square?"
and force all GIS to "Safesearch: Off"
China then becomes a self-correcting problem.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
--we should buy them a million Exchange licenses. Even at full retail cost it'd be a huge win for the US. OTOH, this might violate the Geneva Conventions. Better get Yoo to write another memo.
An even better solution for the scientists would be if they had total freedom of speech.
Currently hooked on AMP
I don't even understand how Google can "pull out of China." Does China have their own Internet?
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try to persuade the general population to play nice with us.
I don't think we are doing a great job of that lately. We are losing our friendly face and honor with the collateral damage from every well-intended military action we take. I know, we have to kill people to stay safe. It's the only way, right? Terrorists are not human, they are unfathomably evil beings from hell and we cannot ever talk to or try to understand them. Time for our 5 minute hate now.
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No, you missed the joke. It's because Exchange is such an a piece of crap that their economy and IT infrastructure will crumble. Mwa haha
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A million people have joined Slashdot since you did. You are now in the oldest third of the Slashdot membership. And yet, somehow, you still haven't mastered the concept of a threaded discussion.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I don't think we are doing a great job of that lately. We are losing our friendly face and honor with the collateral damage from every well-intended military action we take.
Still, I don't think an appropriate response is to make it worse.
Terrorists are not human, they are unfathomably evil beings from hell and we cannot ever talk to or try to understand them.
I think you're being sarcastic... well, I hope...
Besides which, it's not just the terrorists, it's the people. If Iran were really a nation of terrorists -- if every single person in Iran was a terrorist -- we'd all be dead by now.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Google have offices in China, so I suspect "pulling out" would mean closing that and the google.cn domain.
Why close the Google.cn domain when they can just put up a message stating that due to the government's actions the website has been closed down?
Yeah, it will be blocked within a week, but that might hurt the Chinese position even more.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Not to mention, if Google pulls out, China would have a more difficult time to steal their IP to build
a comparable search engine.
I'm only half-kidding
I don't think China would have a hard time making their own Google. The basics are in the public patent Google has on their page rank algorithm.
Even if China blocked Google it wouldn't mean that a state backed effort to emulate Google couldn't be given access.
Most of my searches for reliable LED panel manufacturers end up with complete crap on Google.
Guess maybe certain topics are just spam-laden.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I was in China and was able to use google.com long before google.cn was set up. The government once tried to block it but failed because too many people complaint (yeah -- news for you -- they can complain to government in China.) This "serving Chinese users" theoery is crap. The Chinese users were served by google.com without censoring (by Google,) the only thing that google couldn't do is to sell ads in China. And that's why they set up google.cn and started filtering.
Obviously this is totally convincing (author, methodology, data, ... are overrated anyways).
A related survey shows on Thursday that any guy who watches figure skating is gay. Discuss.
In other news, Google has decided to pull out of China. A frustrated China could not be reached for comment.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Not to mention, if Google pulls out, China would have a more difficult time to steal their IP to build a comparable search engine.
I'm only half-kidding
I don't think China would have a hard time making their own Google. The basics are in the public patent Google has on their page rank algorithm.
Even if China blocked Google it wouldn't mean that a state backed effort to emulate Google couldn't be given access.
Oh, I think it would be more difficult than you think. Give Google credit for developing some pretty sophisticated stuff, and they're a damn tight-lipped outfit ... that patent is probably not that relevant anymore. The basics mean nothing when deploying Web applications on the scale that Google does every day. Sure, China could eventually duplicate Google's technology, but it wouldn't happen overnight, and they'd have to make a similar investment. Which is fine: they've been availing themselves of Google's services for free, and if they're not going to provide an environment in which Google's management wishes to operate, they'll just have to deal with the consequences.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Besides which, it's not just the terrorists, it's the people. If Iran were really a nation of terrorists -- if every single person in Iran was a terrorist -- we'd all be dead b
Or Iran would be glowing in the dark. But that's irrelevant. The problem with terrorism (with destruction in general) is that it's so much easier and less expensive than it's antithesis, creation. It takes an entire people to build a civilization, to build something lasting ... but only a fraction of that number to bring it all crashing down.
That's the problem with terrorists. It really doesn't take that many.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Doesn't the Chinese government have control over the cn tld? If so, putting up a message is unlikely to help, if the government don't like it, they can just have it disabled.
But if Google doesn't pull out, China could get pregnant. And the last thing China needs is another baby.
The average programmer can't code more than 100 lines of code without using google. Imagine how hard it would be to recreate the google without google.
It takes an entire people to build a civilization, to build something lasting ... but only a fraction of that number to bring it all crashing down.
Think back to the root word of "Terrorism".
That fraction of that number can be a catalyst, yes. What determines whether or not it all comes crashing down is largely how we react. The Patriot Act was one of the greatest successes of terrorism -- they scared us so much that we gave away some of our most sacred liberties -- but they couldn't have done it without our help.
Now, nuclear weapons change that somewhat, but not a lot. There's still a fair amount of raw materials and resources needed, so you still need a fair number of people cooperating, usually at least one government. The biggest fear right now is that a terrorist will steal a nuclear weapon from an otherwise-peaceful country -- and the obvious response is, dismantle the nukes.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I bet at least half the people interpreted this question as being about "research without search", and not specifically "without google". That is what the answers suggest. You might lose coke/sprite, but if you still have pepsi/7up life can go on pretty much unhampered.
What would they do with their IP address?
Or do you mean the imaginary concept of “intellectual property”? Something that in the physical reality of this universe can not exist. ;))
If yes, then please stop. Because you are unknowingly spreading media reproduction and artist extortion industry FUD. Which will hurt you too, in the end. And me. Which will result in even more hurt for you.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That would pretty much be just as bad for China IMO.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I suppose they could always try Krugle.
I typed "build google" - see link for results:
http://www.krugle.org/kse/entfiles?query=build+google#1
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
nd the obvious response is, dismantle the nukes.
That is not as easy as you make it sound. It's a very difficult and expensive procedure, and you still end up with a lot of weapons grade fissionable material, which is a lot easier to steal when it's not part of a weapon.
Regardless, the reason that we have been able to implement significant force reductions since the Cold War days is because of our nuclear arsenal. If we give that away (and I hope we don't) then conventional forces become the deciding factor once again. That's not necessarily a good thing, in fact it can put even more of us at risk, and might even make a war more likely. Conventional weapons can kill a lot of people too, it just takes a little longer.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I gotta love the mod war that has broken out over this post... It's taken more than 15 mod points to put it right back where it started at 2.
Just for the record, yes I was being sarcastic. Sorry about that. It is sad how many in our country now are turning to international violence as a supposed solution to "terrorism," which is an undefined term in international law, conveniently for any nation that wants to start a war. Even Iran uses it to justify their actions now. You cannot wage a war on terrorists, any more than you can wage a war on poverty or on drugs, except figuratively. There is no end to this so-called war and the main casualties are foreign civilians and U.S. civil rights.
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You would think that if you were a real scientist researching real things you would be reading scientific journals and not searching the web for random web pages.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I don't actually care about whether google.cn is available or not as long as google.com works.
I can think of another explanation for why "most scientists in China use Google": if you type some words into the search bar, most browsers will go and search for those words on some search engine - which just happened to default to Google, at least until fairly recently. And if you don't mind, you are not going to change. Another things is - just because they asked a number of scientists which search engine they tend to use, it doesn't mean that they use that one for finding information critical to their research.
It would be a sad state of affairs if scientists were truly hampered in their research by not having access to Google, considering the general quality of the results returned by most search engines. Fortunately, if you are a scientist, the things you work with are more readily available from other, more reliable sources.
as Sergeant Major "Shut Up" Williams would have said -)
It's a very difficult and expensive procedure, and you still end up with a lot of weapons grade fissionable material, which is a lot easier to steal when it's not part of a weapon.
Easier to steal, maybe, but you then still have to build a weapon. And wouldn't it be possible to put that to use, in, say, nuclear reactors?
If we give that away (and I hope we don't) then conventional forces become the deciding factor once again. That's not necessarily a good thing...
Not necessarily a bad thing, either.
The endgame of conventional weapons is conventional war, which is devastating and horrible, but survivable.
The endgame of nuclear weapons is MAD and nuclear winter, which would cause far more death and destruction, if, indeed, any humans survived at all.
MAD may be a less likely outcome, as it's less likely that either side would want to actually take that step -- but it's a risk I'd rather not take, if there's a choice. It's also not entirely impossible -- too many religions have an apocalypse story which sounds a lot like nukes.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The Chinese gov't will just replace it (google.cn) with baidu.cn, which they already do on a regular basis.
You wrote:
>...we can't keep people from being able to build nukes
>... the design is obvious enough
If you mean that many of today's governments could assemble
a team of scientists and engineers that could build a working
bomb, then yes, I agree.
But "obvious"? I've never tried to build a nuke myself,
but I'm skeptical that a working design is obvious.
I'm also wondering if you're familiar with this anecdote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Aristotle_Phillips
From Wikipedia:
"According to Phillips' supervisor Freeman Dyson, a renowned physicist,
and professor Harold Feiveson, who held the seminar,
Phillips' design was not functional."
To get nurclear arms, countries like Iran can trade oil for nurclear with North Korea, which is desperate for money and oil. They don't need to google.
Shutting down google means China human right activists cannot use gmail and can only communicate using unsecure email.