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Google and Evil

Posted January 25th, 2006 by quarsan
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So, Google has decided to kneel before the butchers of Tiananmen Square and censor itself in order to get market share "play a more useful role in China".

Julian Pain of Reporters Without Borders - a freedom of expression advocacy group that also has its website blocked in China - accused Google of hypocrisy. "This is very bad news for the internet in China. Google were the only ones who held out. So the Chinese government had to block information themselves. But now Google will do it for them," he said. "They have two standards. One for the US, where they resist government demands for personal information, and one for China, where they are helping the authorities block thousands of websites."

Local bloggers were already wearily resigned to the change. "What Google are doing is targeting commercial interests and skirting political issues," said one of the country's most prominent, who writes under the name Black Hearted Killer. "That by itself is no cause for criticism, but there is no doubt they are cowards."

If you want to see the difference, then here's the same search for Tiananmen square in Google.com and Google.cn

There will be thousands of examples like that. I also tried Chinese government corruption Google.com and Google.cn

Their famous slogan now reads: Don't stand up to evil. This is bad, because they are doing the Chinese government's dirty work for them in the hope of getting an increased market share and income.

Let's take a look at their statement on principles:

Does Google censor search results?

Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results.

Perhaps it's time to rewrite that.

Is it possible to target a

On January 25th, 2006 Jez (not verified) says:

Is it possible to target a Googlebomb to work with google.cn? Could non-China based bloggers affect google.cn? Just an idea - don't know if it could work or not?

A preliminary search of

On January 28th, 2006 16words (not verified) says:

A preliminary search of tiananmen square Zhao Ziyang does appear to provide information relating to the 1989 protest, at least in English. Unless someone can prove me wrong, say by showing that the relevant info is not available in Chinese, then we should perhaps moderate our outrage.

perhaps we should moderate

On January 28th, 2006 quarsan says:

perhaps we should moderate our outrage...

or perhaps we should compare those results to those in the main Google search

once again, the difference is more than slighly noticable.

for your convenience, here's a page os screencaps of the different results google.cn and Google.com give.

I think Google's still ok as

On February 3rd, 2006 A Reader (not verified) says:

I think Google's still ok as long as the two original owners run things.

This concession to the Chinese government was a business decision to gain access to the Chinese market. It's too big of a market to ignore and it would not make a lot of sense from a business decision to reject it.

China has come a long ways over the last twenty years and things will continue to loosen things up over time. Best to remember "That which yields is not always weak."

Once they get to be like Yahoo, then I'll probably change my opinion of them.

We would disagree, as would

On February 3rd, 2006 ringverse says:

We would disagree, as would most of the people at the forum here in Doha... Quarsan pulled the Product manager in the Bloggers session yesterday, and google had little or no support, willl blog it tomorrow.