Censorship

[hellziggy]

I love my Google searches. But all this talk about the censorship in China? It just makes me wonder how much trust we can put into searches here. How are we gonna know that something has been censored out? How will we know when it's Google lying to us?

Here are the results of two Google image searches. The first is at the US site we usually all use: Tiananmen Square

But if you go to google.cn and do the same search, this is what you get: Tiananmen Square

Comments

[jane]

you know? (not to praise big brother, of course, but...)

It might just be that there is more going on around the square than the protests from several years ago. Like, actual life, so there'll be more hits for more recent things there. and since in the us the most recent news from there is not so recent, a us google search will get you a lot of stuff from the protests. (and the fact that it's a part of the taught history here and so there would be more websites and such out there for and by students.)

at least that's what I'm thinking. Not to say that I'm not extremely paranoid, because I am, it's just that sometimes things are sneaky that way. :P

and censorship here?? no, really? fox news anyone?

[hellziggy.livejournal.com]

But if you go through all the images the Chinese one has NO pics of the tanks.

[jane]

oh! very good point! I wonder if there are any later in the search result pages...

(the tanks are such a ubiquitous picture to me that it completely didn't register. d'oh!)

[jane]

damn! and I even did a search with 天安门 and got 4,000+ results, but no tanks. O_o;

A search for 坦克 however did get results, but none of them from the massacre.

that's just sad. :(

[hellziggy.livejournal.com]

I don't read Chinese! What were those searches? I'm guessing the second one is for "tank."

I just searched "tiananmen tank" and got NO matches.
The same thing on the US site brought up 94 matches, including ones from places like cnn.com and news.bbc.co.uk

Yes, very sad.

[jane]

the first is tiananmen and the second is tank. (I don't either, I just like to collect dictionaries and language books. I took, like 1 semester in 10th grade and that's not anywhere *near* enough to be able to read it, so I just looked it up.)

doing a search of 天安门 + 天安门 does get you 2 pictures one of which is not a tank. grrr...

[freyjakj.livejournal.com]

Good example, of course.

[lurker-dave.livejournal.com]

I heard that you can get around the censorship by misspelling 'Tiananmen' in the search.

[kniblet.livejournal.com]

So, can the Chinese people not navigate to the regular Google pages at all? I mean, when I was living in the UK, I could use either Google.com or Google.co.uk, depending on what I was looking for.

[hellziggy.livejournal.com]

I would guess that the gov't probably blocks sites. I don't know anything for sure, but i would guess that they just can't get to anything ...