blackballed only by Google.
"Our focus tends to be more North America and Europe, but we are a bit concerned because we have been expanding into other regions, and China does represent a large potential market for us," said Michael Ellis, privacy and security manager for Date.com.
Scaling the Chinese firewall
To test the effectiveness of search
censorship in China, CNET News.com wrote a computer program to check 4,600
Internet host names compiled by the Open Net Initiative for use in
earlier tests of Chinese filtering. Web sites that were indexed by Google.com
and MSN.com but not their Chinese counterparts were identified. Only a subset
was tested against Yahoo because its Chinese Web site was frequently
nonresponsive, and the program tested only host names, not individual Web pages.
The results showed that Google blocked the most sites, filtering out about 13 percent of the host names tested compared with MSN's 10 percent. But while both MSN and Google deleted pornography and political sites from search listings, Google also singled out more humor sites and more sites related to homosexuality--and it was the only search engine to block information related to alcohol, dating and marijuana.
Danene Sorace, director of the Network for Family Life Education at Rutgers University, said she's not pleased that the university's Sex, etc. site is being filtered out by Google.cn. "The challenge, of course, is that sexual health information often gets mixed up in pornography," Sorace said. "What we are about is about sexual health, and that often gets lost when you apply these kinds of filtering programs."
Google.cn's censorship was not just overinclusive. Like the other search engines, it frequently was underinclusive as well. The pro-marijuana site HighTimes.com is blocked, but its alternate domain name of 420.com was not (420 is a slang term associated with marijuana use). Bacardi.com was missing, but the company's French, German, Canadian and Italian country-code sites were still available. While Penthouse.com and Playboy.com were invisible, searching on the magazines' titles offered an Amazon.com subscription link.
Mickey Spiegel, senior researcher in the Asia division of Human Rights Watch (blocked by Google and Yahoo but not Microsoft), said Google.cn was "a step backwards in terms of freedom of expression issues."
"It will leave the Chinese populace with less and less ability to, in a sense, think for themselves about some of the issues facing them today," Spiegel said. "They are going to have a restricted diet of info, and that is going to color how they view the world. It's a big story, and it's a stain on their image."
Adrienne Verrilli, communications director for the Sexuality Information and Education Council (blocked from Google.cn), said valuable, life-saving Web sites often get blocked in censorship sweeps.
"I guess the Chinese people aren't allowed to get good sexual health information," Verrilli said. "That's unfortunate and disappointing. We have such good information for the Chinese, who are going to be steeped in their own HIV/AIDs crisis very shortly."
Google's Brin told Fortune magazine this week that "if there's any kind of material blocked by local regulations, we put a message to that effect at the bottom of the search engine." Tests show, however, that the message tends to appear only for political sites such as Tibet and Falun Gong, and not the other categories of information censored from Google.cn.
Google's earlier missteps
This is not the first time that the
world's most famous search company has encountered problems when trying to sort
out the difference between what's sex and what's not.
A 2004 investigation by CNET News.com revealed that Google's SafeSearch filter technology incorrectly blocked many innocuous Web sites based solely on strings of letters such as "sex," "girls" or "porn" embedded in their domain names. PartsExpress.com, ALittleGirlsBoutique.com, RomansInSussex.co.uk, ArkansasExtermination.com and BassExpert.com were incorrectly identified as pornographic.
Many of the same problems have plagued Internet filters for the last decade. One 1996 report, for instance, showed that CyberPatrol blocked National Rifle Association and gay and lesbian Web sites, and CyberSitter cordoned off Usenet newsgroups such as alt.feminism and soc.support.fat-acceptance. In a famously embarrassing incident in 1996, America Online's errant dirty-word filter prevented residents of the British town Scunthorpe from signing up as new customers.
China's government has an extensive Internet filtering process in place that controls which overseas Web sites its citizens can access. (A 2005 study by the Open Net Initiative called it "quite thorough.") With that filtering as a guide, foreign companies are expected to build their own lists of Web sites to delete from Chinese search listings.
Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, with offices in Hong Kong and New York, said her group conducted its own test on Wednesday on both Google's U.S. and China search sites in English and Chinese. Searching for "HRIC" in English on Google.com, the group's Web site was the top result, and using the Chinese interface it was the second result. Doing the same search in Chinese on Google.cn the site did not appear in the first 100 results.
Hom said Google justifies its action by saying it must make trade-offs to be able to provide fast, accessible search. "What Google has, unfortunately, done is taken its enormous clout and technology and put it at the service of the Chinese government, who already have the most state-of-the-art surveillance and censorship in the world," she said.
It's not just Google's Web search site that looks different to Chinese users. A search for "Tibet" on Google News through the Google.com site shows links to articles about a benefit for Tibet House, a speech by exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama, and at the fifth spot, a story about the Chinese government censoring information.
That's a sharp contrast with news search results on Google.cn. In English, a search there for news articles about Tibet brings up four results: one about archaeology in Tibet, one with translations of seemingly random sentences, a girl's blog about her first love, and a news story about camel farming that mentions Tibet once. Using Chinese characters to search for "Tibet" news on Google.cn brought up thousands of sites but none among the top 10 results that mentioned Google, Chinese censorship or anything controversial.
A search on news at Google.cn for "Tibet" and "freedom" in English returned no results, while 144 appeared with the same search on Google.com.
CNET News.com's Elinor Mills and Anne Broache contributed to this report.
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