Google Censors Christ
John on January 28, 2006 at 10:46 am
Everyone has probably heard by now about Google’s deal with the Chinese. Essentially google is allowing the communist dictators of that state to censor search results. Much has been made over the Chinese Google version of Tiananmen Square.
Today, Junkyard Blog has done some more tests on Google’s Chinese site and finds, not surprisingly, that Google is censoring Christ. [HT: Michelle Malkin]
Update: After the sarcastic comment below I did my own test. Here are my results for Google China vs. Google US. Feel free to do your own test.
- Searching for Christian displays 618,000 items in China vs. 201 million in the US!
- Protestant reformation yields 2,240 in China vs. 4.1 million in the US.
- Trinity: 310,000 vs. 87.1 million
- Catholic church: 45,000 vs. 68.8 million
- New Testament: 31,000 vs. 50.1 million
- Gospel: 90,800 vs. 92.1 million
- Chinese Bible: 93,000 vs. 17.8 million
That said, it does seem that I am only getting english words in Chinese web sites. In other words, there may be many more pages available if I could type the words in Chinese (perhaps some enterprising blogger will help us with that).
In any case, it seems clear that China’s google has been cut off from the possible hits for these terms in the English speaking world.
Category: Blogs & New Media |
I just searched on google china, and google.com for jesus christ, no quotes, got 139,000 hits on the china site and 155,000 on the .com site. The search term Free Tibet shows up pretty much identical searches, they sure arent doing a good job censoring.
January 28, 2006 @ 7:30 pmMy results for Google China searches are:
Christian: 251,000,000
Trinity: 40,100,000
Gospel: 44,000,000
Chinese Bible: 10,400,000
New Testament: 21,600,000
So as you can see its many orders of magnitude more than what you are seeing.
January 28, 2006 @ 10:15 pmAfter posting I did some more looking around, this site was fairly informative http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060125-072617
January 29, 2006 @ 10:14 amof intrest was China isn’t the first, Germany and France does it to in regards to the search term “Nazi”. The U.S. in accordance with DMCA complaints does it, and also straight across result numbers are not that accurate since the Chinese version of google will be searching for Chinese language versioned websites first, since that is the language of its users. Also when the search engine comes across a censored page it notes that in accordance to laws and such, pages have been ommitted. From my personal experiments the most censored looking results come from “Taiwanese Independence”.