OT: Hands Off Google!

[der.hans]

Am 08. Feb, 2006 schwätzte Randy Melder so:

> editor beating death on
> google.cn<http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=editor+beating+death&btnG=Google+%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&meta=>
> editor beating death on
> google.com<http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=editor+beating+death&btnG=Search+News>

Those are two different searches. The first is a web search and the second
is a news search.

http://www.Google.com/search?hl=de&q=editor+beating+death&btnG=Google-Suche&lr=

http://www.Google.de/search?hl=de&q=editor+beating+death&btnG=Google-Suche&meta=

Still different results for .cn.

http://www.Google.de/search?hl=zh-CN&q=editor+beating+death&btnG=Google-Suche&meta=

Note that's Chinese language, but Google.de.

http://www.Google.com/search?hl=en-US&q=editor+beating+death&btnG=Google-Suche&lr=

Still essentially the same non-.cn results for US search at Google.com.

Wonder what happens if you make an English search of Google.cn from within
.cn?

In any case, please remember that companies have had to censor themselves
or customers due to local laws elsewhere. .fr and .de don't allow several
things ( trying to avoid Godwin's Law ( Oh my! Now, I'm censoring
myself... ) ), the .us doesn't allow 'child' porn. Depending on the age of
the 'child' the same content might be perfectly legal elsewhere as some
other countries have younger ages of consent. Most countries also censor
technology exchange to some extent, e.g. PGP.

If Google and m$ are truly notifying people when results have been left
out due to government restrictions that's already pushing the envelope to
reduce censorship. Do Google or m$ notify us if searches are censored in
the .us? Are there pages that don't get indexed by Google due to content?

I can't read the dominoes and things at the bottom of the .cn page, so no
idea if those are warnings of censorship.

> do no evil... well maybe just a little evil. no one will notice.

Turning info over to the .us gov't without fighting the illegal request is
evil. Turning over personal info the the .cn gov't or the RIAA or MPAA
without fighting it is evil.

If they lose the fight they still have to comply with the law. I'd like to
think one would choose to just not do business in a country like that, but
I doubt Google, m$ or Yahoo are going to stop doing business in the .us...

As to Joshua's point below. No, I don't just jump up against something
because m$ is doing it. I try to only criticize the evil things m$
does. Pretty easy considering how large that list is...

BTW, is m$ still skewing search results to censor critics and abnormally
promote its own pages?

The Tiananmen queries below end up both being handled by .com servers for
me and have the same results.

ciao,

der.hans


> On 2/6/06, Joshua Zeidner <jjzeidner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> This is too good to hold back.
>>
>> Tiananmen image search in China<http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen>
>> Tiananmen image search in the rest of the world
>> <http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen>
>>
>> On 2/2/06, Randy Melder <randymelder at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> What's really sad is that if it were Microsoft agreeing to censorship,
>>> you'd be all over them... for some reason, Google gets a pass? Why?
>>>
>>
>

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