Saturday 28 January 2006

Sanitized search

Tiananmen Square from google.cn Image 1 of 42 from a Google image search for Tiananmen Square on google.cn.




Tiananmen Square from google.com Image 1 of about 14000 results for the same search on google.com.


[Courtesy of a Slashdot post]




It appears from this and a few other quick searches I tried, that Google's capitulating to China and "filtering" their results amounts to only returning results for pages that are located inside the Great Firewall.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Got more results back when I typed in 天安門 instead of English Tiananmen Square. But still only 196 images. (Just realised that saying "Tiananmen Square" is saying "tianan square square".)


http://images.google.cn/images?svnum=10&hl=zh-CN&lr=&cr=countryCN&q=%E5%A4%A9%E5%AE%89%E9%96%80>

Anonymous said...

Thanks Yuki. I was too lazy to look up the Hanzi myself :-). Interestingly, if you do the same search on normal Google: http://www.google.com/images?q=%E5%A4%A9%E5%AE%89%E9%96%80
you get some images of protestors, but still none of the tanks. So does that mean that no Taiwanese, Hong Kong or other Chinese language websites outside of China reported on those events fully? Incidentally, when I was in my second year of University, I flatted with a Chinese woman whose brother lost a leg after being run over by a tank in those protests, so I find the lack of Chinese media coverage even outside of China interesting.>

Anonymous said...

Then, isn't that mean even Japan site hasn't reported or showed the picture of the tank either? That sounds very strange. I may google a bit more in Japanese with 天安門 and see what I can find if I have some spare time.>