Google’s Chinese Censorship

I’m sure this is old news to some people, but it’s new to me and I think worth repeating regardless. A commentor on my recent post about Google and the US government linked to two very interesting sets of search results.

First is the search results for a Google Image Search for “Tianamen Square” in the good ole USA. And second is the same search string on Google’s Chinese site. You’ll notice that in our version, the photos that appear are of the famous incident with the student protestor standing down a tank. In the Chinese version, you don’t seem to see any of that - it’s mostly just photos of people smiling and food.


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4 Comments

  1. Posted March 16, 2006 at 2:30 pm | Permalink

    hi Tim, it is my understanding that the person standing in front of the tank in that famous picture was a worker that had seen the tanks rolling up after work and he choose to stand it down. in the film you see the tank try to swerve past him several times before finally rolling over him. his identity, as far as i know, is unknown. certainly the most heroic act of courage i’ve ever seen in my life. i vividly remember the day it happened when i was in first grade. it was a sunday and all the morning cartoons were cancelled for news reports.

  2. Posted March 16, 2006 at 4:09 pm | Permalink

    what would happen if you searched the chinese version of google using a chinese character set instead of english?

    just wondering . . . .

  3. prnsqlr
    Posted March 16, 2006 at 5:13 pm | Permalink

    what would happen if you searched the chinese version of google using a chinese character set instead of english?

    Traditional Chinese

    Simplified Chinese

    The Chinese characters were taken from here.

  4. Tom
    Posted March 17, 2006 at 4:34 am | Permalink

    Though interestingly, if you search the Chinese Google with Tianamen spelled the same way you wrote it in your post (without the extra n), you do get some pictures of the protestor - including one of a Tianamen Square video game.

    Check it out

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