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Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Chinese Google - to censor or not to censor

I was checking out the whole Google.cn thing where supposedly typing in "Tiananmen square" only yields peaceful pictures, while if you were to enter the very same thing in google.com you'd get pictures of tanks and the violence.

I tried it earlier today when the story was still fresh, and got results similar to what was reported. However, I just tried it again and now my searches yielded plenty of pictures with tanks. And, here's a link to a time article I found in one of my most recent searches on google.cn after typing in "Chinese Massacre".

So, is Google censoring or not? We all heard how they bowed to the pressure of the Chinese govt to allow blocking of certain info. And, I'm sure Tiananmen Square would be one of those things the Chinese govt would like blocked. So, what's going on?

Well, it's hard to say. In between writing the above and what you are now reading, I went back and did a few more searches. What I got then was those peaceful pictures. If I misspelled Tiananmen like so: Tienanmen - I got no results. But after finding google.cn from Google.com and linking to it from there, I was able to view pictures of tanks and bloodied bodies in excess once again. So, I don't know what's going on.

Anybody?