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31 January 2006
As Alexander mentioned earlier today Google has famously agreed to tailor the results of their new Chinese product. (Summary and links here) The image search has also been affected. Floating around the anti-censorship community is a very evocative comparison of the American and Chinese Google Image searches for "tiananmen":
http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen
http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen
Is this google censorship?
An easy observation is that the google.cn results are all from the .cn domain. Indeed, a google.com search of images from the .cn domain yields a similarly sanitized image collection. But google.cn doesn't draws from the wide web, not just local searches: running google.cn searches with a misspelled "tianamen" or, even more damning, a capitialized "Tiananmen" reveals many pictures of the infamous 1989 incident. This is not search optimized for local or cultural interests; this is top-down intervention in a very successful bottom-up search algorithm.
Posted by Allan Friedman at January 31, 2006 9:44 AM