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."

Comments

You Have Severely Misplaced Shame

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:You Have Severely Misplaced Shame

[DigiShaman]

Google is empowering the Chinese citizen with knowledge that he/she is actively being censored. Previously, it was all mysterious rumors. I mean, they know there's censorship, but without defined boundaries. That aspect of being unknown invokes fear. Fear is control. What Google is doing is providing solidification to that fact. As I've said earlier, this will backfire can cause Google to be kicked out.

The Chinese government is a lot like that mysterious "Architect" in the movie The Matrix. They want to control without being the source of instability. By making censorship an actively known issue, they've become a major fly in the ointment. The government will not have this. I guarantee!

Re:You Have Severely Misplaced Shame

[oakgrove]

sure, they help you avoid the chinese knowing what you are searching for. but you still can't search for it!

Why do people run their mouths when they have no idea what they are talking about? As can be plainly seen in this screenshot, it is quite clear that you can search for it by simply clicking the "search anyway" link. Google is just being helpful and letting you know that you are probably going to not be able to get much of a response and it is out of their control.

Re:You Have Severely Misplaced Shame

[Lithdren]

I dont think you're understanding whats happening here at all.

Google is not removing results from their search. A user comes along and searches for "Human Rights Abuses in Tibet" for example. If I run the search I get about 4.5 million hits (my lord, 4.5 million hits on that? Anyway...) because i'm in the US.

If I were in china, i'd get a 404 page not found error, or some other weird obsure error page.

Whats happening is someone between me and Google is intercepting the search query, deciding on some filter if what im searching for is appropriate based on some unknown list of "not to be known" subjects, and if my searches dont pass the test I dont get the results back. Peoplere were complaining to Google because it seemed like it was Google's fault.

So Google is now going to turn around and say "Hey, you, user. Yeah you! Just wanna let you know, searching for that has resulted in people not getting results."

So, yeah, way to jump on the "OMG GOOGLE IS EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL AND IM SMART FOR POINTING IT OUT HAHAHAHAHAHA" bandwagon. Your bias is showing.

Reminds me of stills during prohibition

[shoppa]

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.

Highlighting the censorship

[johnjaydk]

If You read TFA then You will see that this service actually HIGHLIGHTS the censorship process.

IMHO that's doing the right thing.

Re:Hidden censorship

[_0x783czar]

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.

Re:Hidden censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hidden censorship

[artor3]

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.

Re:Hidden censorship

[jonnythan]

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.

Re:Hidden censorship

[squiggleslash]

From TFS:

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.

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.

Re:Just China?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Germany you often get a little notice at the bottom of the results if something has been filtered because of our censorship laws (mostly fro-teh-children bullshit). It would be nice if it was more obvious and more specific though. At least they link to chillingeffects.org, where you can compare local search results to "global" search results.