Tell HN: Consider the implications of Google pulling google.cn | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Consider the implications of Google pulling google.cn

5 pointsgrandalf5 comments

When google.cn was available but censored, anyone in the US could simply run the same query on both and make a list of the missing results in google.cn to tell what was being censored.

Such a list lent itself to easily gathering the censored documents and distributing them via other secure means to China.

Now, thanks to Google, that is impossible. Did this fact really escape the minds at Google?

Google.cn was a great window into what the Chinese government doesn't want the Chinese people to see... now it's gone.

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To be fair, you can easily do the same with any number of other search engines (e.g. Yahoo). In fact, the original metric that you've proposed isn't very useful because the same search terms mean different things in different languages. For instance, in China the Tiananmen Square protests are called the "June Fourth Incident" (literally: 六四事件) so comparing a search for an English phrase with the same phrase on google.cn might not be meaningful.

If you really just want to know what topics are being censored, there are a number of human rights organizations and non-profits that track such things.

You don't have to search google.com in English, you can use the exact same search phrase in either language, and if you go over the first 100 pages of results you can get quite a good list even with imprecise search phrases.

This is a strange post to me. Are you saying that Google deciding not to allow censored results is a bad decision or are you just pointing this out? I'm trying to figure out what your position on this is.

I do not understand Google's decision.

First, the Chinese people would be better off with google.cn, regardless of whether or not it's censored. If anything, having quality results for non-censored topics will help them build economic prosperity, satisfy curiosity, etc.

Second, the decision makes it difficult to tell exactly what is being censured. This helps the Chinese government significantly. The most dangerous form of ignorance is when we don't know what we don't know.

Third, Google had risen above the issue by indicating in google.cn search results pages that information had been censored. This is a powerful anti-censorship message with every search. Now it's gone.

It does not take courage to give up and pull out of China, it takes courage to design a system so essential that the Chinese government relents on its censorship rules.

In reality, Google is not winning in search in China, so rather than have to continually answer to investors about why Google can't manage to make a dent in the search market in China, Google can now claim that it has a noble humanitarian stance. As I've shown above, the stance is neither noble or humanitarian.

I can't believe there is nearly a rate of 100% of people in the west falling for this ploy.

Scraping Google is against their TOS, so your point is null and void.

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