Google Conforms to Chinese Censorship SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc.'s recently launched news service in China doesn't display results from Web sites blocked by that country's authorities, raising prickly questions for an online search engine that has famously promised to "do no evil." Dynamic Internet Technology Inc., a research firm striving to defeat online censorship, conducted tests that found Google omits results from the government-banned sites if search requests are made through computers connecting to the Internet in China. Steered by an identical search request, computers with a United States connection retrieved results from the sites blocked by China. ...
I think people are really blowing things out of proportion. google isn't censoring things, china's government is. what good would it do to display results to users in china that they can't even reach? of course they filter things out- not to "be evil"- but just to give users in china a better experience.
When in Rome I guess. Really, what choice do they have? If they dont comply, they too will be banned and make nothing ($$$) - being public now, they ahve a responsibility to make as much as they can wherever they can.
>which might provoke a revolution It might help if they had access to the materials the Chinese gov. is banning And on to the real question that I see here... We have all said for so long that Google's way of doing things is that they solve problems mathematically/algorithmically and they want their business to be pure science. This appears to be a deviation from that philosophy. What do they do? Apply a list of banned words/domains to the SERPs before displaying the content? Some of you have said that G is not banning, the Chinese gov is. Well, I say they both are. Or maybe G is doing this to gain trust and then later on they will let "banned" materials slip through BTW, read the whole article if you want http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/040925/google_china_3.html