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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."
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.
Well, if you go to China you'll find that it's amazingly easy to trigger the GFW. Browsing the English web is really flaky. Even if the Chinese govt didn't pro-actively block Google (as they have done with Facebook and YouTube) it'd still be a pain to use it.
I don't think the Chinese government offers "exemptions" except for foreign journalists (sometimes). I also suspect they view circumvention dimly. The whole point of the GFW is to stop smart, influential people from getting ideas they shouldn't!
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?
...nations and fields of research are not yet dependent on them...
So you're willfully ignoring the testimony of Chinese scientists? That's like watching something fall and then saying you don't believe in gravity.
Baidu is a sino-centric search engine, which for the average Chinese is a positive thing as they don't frequently need international results, but for scientists who constantly need international and multi-lingual results, Baidu doesn't hold a candle to Google. That's why Baidu has the majority of marketshare in China nationally, but is a minority among Chinese scientists.
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
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!
I haven't seen much (in terms of free web-based services) to compete with Google Scholar in terms of searching journals, searching forward and back through their mutual citations, and finding the versions of articles that aren't the main one locked behind the original journal's paywall.
PubMed doesn't spit out bibtex entries for papers, show how many citations a paper has, show who has CITED a specific paper, or have near the search power. Google Scholar may not have your field pegged yet, and PubMed might be an important place for your paper to show up, but Google Scholar has vital features that no other search engine has.
If they don't want to hire citizens here, they can incorporate somewhere else.
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!
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
I regularly ignore the testimony of the masses when it comes to religion, politics, economics, and yes, tech as well.
Why? Because at times I'm cynical and think everyone is an idiot. Case in point: The ipod sold well.
So why not Bing, Yahoo, Altavista, Dogpile, yada yada.... Or why not go to a foreign Google site?
They've been stealing our tech for so long, they deserve it.
"Men willingly believe what they wish." - Julius Caesar