(Don't) Do no harm...
Just read in Hebrew Haaretz about Google's recent agreement with Chinese government. The results from google.ch are going to be monitored and censored. So much for ubiquity of the Internet and the "embedded" freedom of speech...
Couldn't help myself but try :)
Search terms: communism critique
(google.cn: 1,020,000 results / google.com: 1,760,000 results)
Search terms: human rights watch
(google.cn: 55,600,000 results / google.com: 55,700,000 results)
And a bit more complex one: human rights watch china
(google.cn: 12,800,000 results / google.com: 103,000,000 results)
And now checking the e-mail i came over another today's article featuring the same topic in Guardian. I tried searching for "Tiananmen Square massacre", which is mentioned in Guardian as a forbidden search, and i got some results. Actually the first page results were pretty much the same at both google.com and google.cn. The mainly apparent difference was in the umber of results (281K in .com and 158K in .cn), which i think was also shared by the previous searches (for some reason in all searches at .cn the number of results was lower compared to a similar string at .com).
However, it seems to me that the fact that i got results for supposedly forbidden strings, might be dependent on my IP address. A few months ago some of my friends and i did a small experiment searching google.com for the same string, but from different locations (Pakistan, Brazil and Israel). Not surprisingly we got different results. Makes you think...
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28 Jan 2006: I am sorry, just noticed that you can't really enlarge the screen-shots, so they are not really readable... Well, the point is that filtering works :)
22 Feb 2006: I edited this post once again. Added links from the screen-shots to the actual search results (from today of course) and also the number of results per search term on each site.
6 comments:
I think it depends on two things.
One is where you are searching from. We did an experiment once running the same search from Israel, Pakistan and Brazil - we all got slightly different results. Where are you searching from?
The other reason is probably the inverted commas. When i search for a phraze "human right watch" i get only 7,120,000 results (less than you do). But when i search for human right watch (without the inverted commas) i am getting 55,700,000 results (just re-checked it :).
Now it sounds really weird... Maybe it also depends if you are searhing while logged in to your google account?
I don't know how exactly it works, but i wouldn't be surprised if while logged in, they analyse your searching patterns and suggest results which should best fit what you were looking for... don't you think?
Were you logged in while searching?
Not sure if it's wishful, but it is certainly weird. Any other thoughts?
Great post! Did you notice the difference between the (old) google.com.cn and (replacement) google.cn Dima? The latter has a seal of the government of China. I'm afraid it shows just who owns Google in China now :) In fact, I just discovered I can not access either of the sites above, here in Australia. I guess Google is sick of curious Westerners finding out more about the .cn censorship.
But it's no secret Gmail/Gmail login means Google can track your search history and affect your search results at the personal level, but you can choose to turn that off (when signed in) or just sign out of your account.
And results (and AdSense ads) are secondly affected by the geolocation (is usually just the country, because that is about as accurate as you can get with most IP numbers).
Of course its possible Google still tracks this personal search data when you choose to turn it off, but I think Google's more interested in tracking the trends coming from IP addresses near you in your country.
I checked google.com.ch and google.ch and didn't see any difference. Maybe they updated both sites already? Where is the seal? Is it the gray shield at the bottom? And it sounds really weird that you cannot access the sites from Australia. That would be crossing some red lines i guess...
I am thinking about sending a question to google about the difference in results... interesting.
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