Google.cn Filtering: How It Works

Lesser evil?...

Joining the fray in the Google China censorship (soon-to-be?) debacle.
I’d like to put things in perspective, so a chronology is in order:

24 January 2005. Google agrees to censor sites that are objectionable to the Chinese government, puts up a...

Como funciona (y evitar) el filtrado de Google.cn...

Como nos cuenta Antonio, Google anunciaba esta semana que lanzaba Google.cn, una versión del buscador conforme con las exigencias de control del gobierno chino y capando por tanto la búsqueda en sitios considerados sensibles para el gobierno chino.
Si ...

i strongly think dat it is against "Right to Information Act"....which is unlawful!! Atleast in India...Grow up guys

Why would this be restricted? Is it because it links directly to the GOP website and they wanted to limit traffic during the election? There is no underhanded reason to limit access, is there?

How to evade censorship on the web...

Try some Anonymous Surfing
Take a look at Peacefire
You can also visit OpenNet Initiative
There is also en entry on OpenNet Initiative’s Blog about the way Google uses censorship in Chinahere.
Or better yet install your own proxy server to help o...

Hey

It's hard to believe how Orwellian the Chinese government is in relation to the Internet. In a recent Harpers magazine article there was a short piece on the tobacco industry. It's controlled by the government (or provides the lion share of the revenues for the government). One of the results of this is that the internet is used as a means for spreading the idea that smoking is beneficial. Websites set up by the government detail the benefits in very grandiloquent fashion. Anyways, it's very terrifying to think that a country of 1.3 billion people can be cut off from the worlds dominate source of information, or have it so manipulated that common knowledge (like smoking increases risk of cancer) can be distorted for large political-economic rational.

Eric

Then what is the use of google in that country when a majrity of sites are delisted. We can fight back this move of google by putting up as many "Anti China" banners in the majority of website.Evntually china will have to block them too ,this will make the internet surfing a pain in the A** for the chineses people and well they MAY revolt against the gov.t policy .
NO much of help but that's my contributuion

I doubt english protest do you any good, for those who do not know, the chinese ppl speak chinese(you'd be suprised how many americans don't know that), and I doubt much of you can pursuade any sites in china to change their theme into anti china, nationality aside, business people try to make money, getting no customers is the worst way to make money. the problem is, the gov don't tell google what is sensitive, so google blocks off more than nessisary, google's competitor baidu shows way more results, simply because it knows what to block. for example, a website that claims: "chinese gov suck ass" would not be blocked, however, a website that claims: "chinese gov suck ass so people should over throw it" will be blocked. google just blocks both to save the trouble. in fact, if you go to some of the more famous chinese forums, a good amount of the themes is anti-china(some even front page, and to the extreme sometimes, I might say), and that's what leaves google baffled:why are they allowed? to google there is no obvious pattern, so they simply block everything. the ingenious part is: there is no actual sensorship done on the part of chinese gov, they just tell people: watch what you shows, and leave the sensoring to themselves. and occasionally they would barge in and purge your database in completely random ways. sometimes a banned site is allowed again for no particular reason, yet the site itself have not changed. this is why google is confused, cuz sometime the gov seem to be asking for bad press, the trick is to know how things work. for example, google consider the word "communist party" to be sensitive, forgetting that in china it is not a taboo word like it is in america.

Let me start off by saying that I’m not going to pretend to be as politically savvy or as much of an activist compared to some... However, when I caught wind of the Google.cn cersorship news back in January, it just didn’t sit well with me... which will probaly make my comment/reply more of a “personal struggle” nature than most you might get.

I eventually decided to stop using Google’s services. However, more and more applications/online services/company websites are building Google services right into their own... it’s been getting harder and harder to avoid them. In addition to this, I was recently pointed to your Google.cn vs Google.com comparison site where I learned that “Google informs its users when their search results have been filtered (to date, Microsoft and Yahoo!'s Chinese search services do not), and provides users with a link to the unfiltered Google.com home page”.

After having read many-an-article arguing that some censored information is better than no information at all and just as many slamming the big “G” calling for a full-out boycott, in an ongoing personal effort to stay as informed as possible, I guess I have come to OPI with the hopes for further clarification. This site, out of all the ones I have visited, seems to best research and report on the severity of Google.cn censorship and internet censorshop in general.

Does the fact that Google.cn offers the “Sorry we had to censor your results — government policy. Give the Chinese Google.com a spin... the results are still censored but hey, at least we didn’t do it ourselves” approach somehow lessen the severity of Google’s agreement to censor its results at all? Or is Google.cn meerly the result of another mega-company caring more about more money than how their actions actually affect people? Is a full-out boycott hasty or appropriate?

Any input/opinion at all would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers.
--
steelie

I can not access www.google.cn - if I try I just get redirected to the New Zealand Google site. However this is not teh case for every other Google country site I have accessed. If it is only Google.cn then Google are not only censorin gteh people of China but also blocking access to me and others, presumably to stop them from seeing how the people of China are beign censored.

thanks
for this documents

The filtering takes place in two ways:

1. de-listed domains: specific websites are removed entirely from search results; it is as if the website never existed.
2. de-listed urls: specific urls are removed from search results if they contain a de-listed domain.

Hello everybody, my name is Damion, and I'm glad to join your conmunity,
and wish to assit as far as possible.