Google.cn Has Already Lifted Censorship

An anonymous reader writes "In an update to Google's withdrawal from China, there are reports that censorship has already been lifted. It's probably taken a while to report because of Google's ranking system." Just a warning that the language on that blog post is NSFW but it does provide evidence.

I Don't Think Censorship's Been Lifted

[eldavojohn]

It's probably taken a while to report because of Google's ranking system.

I don't understand how this explains it. The searches shown have very low results for the offensive images? I don't think Google would be foolish enough to remove values from their page ranking system or fiddle with those numbers. Rather it would seem much more intuitive to build an interface that filters designated problem links and images. It's probably even automated for some bullshit arm of the Chinese government (who the devil is it these days? The Ministry of Culture?) that can go into a web portal and just add images and domains and pages to a list of restrictions. Maybe even the government is savvy enough to have an feed or service that gives this information out to companies to assure compliance and ease of compliance? A simpler answer is that a few new sites popped up and the government just hasn't added them to the no-no list yet. If you look at the URLs in the images, they are from blogspot.com which means they're probably new blogs that need to be individually blocked by the Chinese government and/or Google. What you're probably seeing is lazy censorship or the latency of an adequate solution for censorship -- which is pretty much as defective by design as it gets. I don't think "lifts" censorship is what's going on here or else Google would be looking at losing business to one sixths of the world's population. While Google professes 'do no evil' they still have shareholders to satisfy.

Germany still censored

[Affenkopf]

Meanwhile German Google is still censored (no youporn and a few other porn sites, no neo nazi sites).

I wish our government would do something to piss Google off so that we could have uncensored search results (to be fair: In Germany we can just switch from the censored google.de to the uncensored google.com)

Re:Falun Gong

[Albanach]

Yahoo is especially interesting here. If you search for something innocuous like Hong Kong

http://search.cn.yahoo.com/search?p=Hong%20Kong [yahoo.com]

It works fine.

Change the search

http://search.cn.yahoo.com/search?p=Falun%20Gong [yahoo.com]

And yahoo.cn drops the connection, and seems to do so based on your IP for a few minutes thereafter.

Re:Falun Gong

[elrous0]

Thank god Yahoo is such a joke because their search results are particularly nasty. Not only do they not show results if you search for Falun Gong, but it will block you from doing ANY other searches (for a while) if you even try. Yahoo would be dangerous if they were a stronger company that anyone gave a shit about.

Re:Good for you, Google

[Infernal Device]

This is a mere trifle to the Chinese government. Real change will have to come from within China - when enough of them want a change in their government and way of life, they'll fight for it. Otherwise, there's really not much anyone can do that will improve things measurably.

Re:Images definitely still censored

[Majin Bubu]

that's because it's "tiEnanmen", not "tiAnanmen"

http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&safe=active&um=1&sa=1&q=tienanmen+square+tank+man&btnG=Google+%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&aq=f&oq=&start=0 [google.cn]

Re:Falun Gong

[PhilHibbs]

I think the page rank algorithm favours pages linked within the country of the search server. If not many .cn sites link to www.falundafa.org, then that site will have a low page rank on google.cn.

Still censored, but don't care

[euyis]

I am Chinese and have been using the Google.com (/ncr) for years. Never touched that .cn shit, and actually we call it "the eunuch Google".

Re:Images definitely still censored

[blee37]

According to CNN, Tiananmen is the proper spelling and Tienanmen is a misspelling that is not properly censored due to technical errors. Apparently those errors have not been fixed since 2006. http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/30/technology/browser0130/index.htm [cnn.com] Thanks for the link though. Impressive number of tank man pictures. I hope Google does provide uncensored search, even if for just a few hours.

Re:Porn Providors Rejoice

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing about the Chinese blocking of porn is that, when I lived in china in 2004, you could buy porn everywhere. There were porn stores on the street with large explicit posters facing the street where everyone could see. Most DVD stores (and department stores) had a small shelf of porn next to the other DVDs. Like much of the other Chinese restrictions, this one seemed to be little more than a joke.

Re:I only hope

[Maxo-Texas]

It surprises me how fast they have regrown an educated class after killing so many back in the 50's.
And now PHD's are going back to China. I guess they don't think it will happen again.

There is a lot of racial patriotism in china. One of the best things that could happen there is a lot of immigrants and intermarriage to break up that meme- I think it's potentially dangerous the way aryanism was.