(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.

A note on WSIS (before I completely forget)

Well, it's been so long since I've wrote anything here. I keep on putting aside ideas for future posts, but not getting the time to actually write them. Looks like I have to learn making shorter posts more frequently :)

Anyhow, the WSIS topic is left somehow open from my previous post and what I wanted to do is to put a temporal stop here.

It seems to me that the de-facto main issue of WSIS is left undecided. There was no decision on the structure of Internet governance and it seems like the decision was not to decide. Unless I miss something critical here, the decision not to decide means the US point of view prevailed. The web is left to evolve within the current set of rules and governing bodies, with a committee established to think about the future. However, I am left with a feeling of ambiguous ending for the summit. I do not see what were the practical outcomes, either in the original (development) or the emerged (governance) tracks. Or maybe nothing practical was supposed to come out of the summit? I am confused...