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Google Highlights Censored Search Terms In China
itwbennett writes "Responding to complaints from Chinese Googlers that the search engine is 'inconsistent and unreliable,' Google has updated its service to help users steer clear of search queries that will result in page errors. Google will now highlight characters and phrases that are likely to 'break' a user's connection. 'By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China,' the company said in a blog post."
Fuck governments who censor the internet. That's all.
I'm still trying to work out if Google is not being American evil, not being Chinese evil, being completely evil, or not being evil at all in all of this.
John
Hw are they hiding it? They're blatantly pointing out that users shouldn't use terms least they be disconnected or run into censorship, even for common things that they might not have thought of before. Now youll probably get a warning for something when you weren't even remotely looking for something subversive.
I could of sworn I remember seeing an article that google was no longer censoring in china, did they go back on that while I wasn't looking?
Hidden censorship is worse than obvious censorship. Shame on Google for hiding China's shame.
I don't understand this logic at all. From the summary:
Google will now highlight characters and phrases that are likely to 'break' a user's connection.
Uh so it looks like Google is calling attention to China's censorship and giving users a nod ahead of time that their search is going to be censored. This is far from "hiding" anything and, conversely, lets the user know about the censorship. The other good thing this does is that if I'm interested in censored terms and my IP hits the great firewall with these censored terms, the government might build a dossier on my entire histories to see what else I'm interested in and have dirt on me if they need it. But if Google is warning me ahead of time, this never hits the firewall and China doesn't get to profile their citizens based on search queries. Google will enable you, if you so choose, to appear to keep your nose clean.
My work here is dung.
During prohibition in the US, stills could be owned and sold, just not used to produce alcoholic beverages. There were still legitimate purposes for stills, e.g. malt extract for baking.
The manufactures helped out, by giving very explicit instructions on exactly what NOT TO DO, because if you followed all the steps, you'd end up with whiskey. And you wouldn't want to do that.
If You read TFA then You will see that this service actually HIGHLIGHTS the censorship process.
IMHO that's doing the right thing.
TCAP-Abort
Google is not hiding, nor aiding China's censorship. In a way... Google is actually "highlighting" China's censorship. Google is a company that wants to keep its customers. It's customers think that Google is to blame for what they can't find (at least from what I understand about the article) and so Google is trying to make it clear that certain things they look for will not work, since their Government doesn't trust them. To those who grasp this concept, every time a word they type in the query box gets highlighted its like Google saying "sorry, your Government doesn't want you to know about that". Whether Google has any other motive than just making it clear that they are not to blame for failed searches or not, the result in the minds of the observant is still worth noting.
~theCzar
I'd like to see this feature rolled out in every country. There are very few countries that aren't busy censoring something; Whether it's the copywrongers or some anti-terror legislation, or the latest "Save the children" law, Google receives piles of censorship demands weekly from every government. We can't just say "Shame on China!" when everyone else is doing variations on the same theme.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Oh God! A company having the audacity to tell you about things you might want to buy?! Truly, they are the most evil people to have ever walked the face of this good Earth.
Google helpfully telling the Chinese people, "Hey, this search term won't work, maybe you should try another *wink wink*". That should make it easier to to bypass China's filters.
Has anyone got any good articles, documentaries, or personal experiences about what ordinary Internet use is like in the PRC? Does filtering or censorship show up as a brick wall "COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY CONTENT FORBIDDEN", or a passive "sorry, no such content found"? How often does it affect ordinary daily browsing? If ordinary browsers are aware of it, do they generally develop a seething resentment of it, or a shrug-and-live-with-it accpetance (or resignation) like some western employees whose workplaces filter access? I'd be interested to read something objective about what the filter actually is, what it does, and how the Chinese generally feel about it.
It's not Google doing the censoring. Apparently China interferes somehow with connections that are caught searching for various terms. Google now highlights certain words and pops up a notice that it has observed these words may break your connection.
From TFS:
My reading of that is that Google is being censored, not that Google is censoring as otherwise not a word in it makes sense.
If Google were censoring, then the search engine would work normally, it's just certain search results would not appear. So a search for "Tienanmen Square Massacre" would come up with pages of results of, say, Fred Tienanmen's blog entry where he massacres those proposing that squares have the same sized sides, but would be absent anything about some funny business that occurred in China during the 1980s.
That's not what's happening though. What TFS is saying is that users are suffering random page errors, that the engine feels "inconsistent and unreliable". That's consistent with a third party, say, perhaps, the Great Firewall of China, interrupting page downloads as they happen because they have naughty words on them.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
A virus that infects thousands or computers could send out these key search words and take down an entire network.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
leave people the hell alone to conduct their lives in peace already!
Sorry, but you were filtered... nobody could read you there.
Automatically redirect to the https version of Google. Problem solved.
I would think that giving people interactive hints that can be used to work around censorship is generally 'not evil'. More evil than taking a stand and ignoring the Chinese government until they're completely blocked and replaced wholesale with a Chinese government controlled search engine? Perhaps, perhaps not.
>>>google is simply a company. companies are never there for your benefit. never.
I agree with the first sentence, because companies should not be worshipped like football teams. They are inaminate entities and nothing more. But disagree with the second. Companies ARE there to serve the customer and keep him/her happy, because it they don't they end-up like Montgomery Wards or Circuit Shitty (bankrupt).
I visited Wards during its final selloff. The employees there looked extremely depressed, and it was kinda sad, but that's how a free market works. You either win the "votes" of the customers' dollars, or you don't and get removed. The market is a democracy where the Demos (the People) decide who wins and loses. (Except when government interfere with bailouts/stimulus/corporate welfare.) So far Google has been winning the votes, while other ad agencies like Youtube struggle to survive.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
By google providing users with information about what is blocked they are enabled to more rapidly formulate queries which bypass censorship. The change is a win for all but oppressive control.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
The search can still be performed, but it is China — NOT Google — that is doing the censoring by interfering with queries which contain offending terms.
Before, if someone in mainland China performed a search containing an offending term, equipment that is part of the so-called "Great Firewall" would interfere with the search, making it appear that the search results page was unavailable or resetting the browser's connection, and then making Google unavailable to the user for a period.
Now, Google is warning you that will happen based on observations of which search terms resulted in China's filters blocking the search results.
Why are there so many ignorant comments on this post claiming that it's "Google" the one doing the blocking? They're not.
You can still do the search by hitting "Search Anyway". Anywhere other than mainland China, this search will work. Just try it. If you're in mainland China and you elect to search anyway, that will result in your connection being reset and will temporarily break your ability to interact with Google. It is China, not Google, that is doing this.