Researchers: Search engine censorship has impact

Network World staff, Network World (US online)

16/03/2006 08:28:12

Indiana University researchers have created a Web site that highlights differences in query results provided by country-specific search engines, such as the version of Google built to accommodate China's free-speech restrictions.

The idea behind CenSEARCHip is to determine the impact countries' censorship laws have on search results. The project was largely inspired by the google.cn system that Google decided to create earlier this year for China (Yahoo and MSN have followed suit). <snip>

The CenSEARCHip site shows side-by-side query results from the different countries' search engine versions. It uses "tag clouds" to highlight terms used more or less often by the different search engines.

Indeed, the search engines do produce significantly different results on searches about political topics, such as human rights and democracy, Meiss says. A search on Tiananmen Square, for example, results in many text references and images of the Chinese government crackdown on protesters in 1989 on the U.S. search site, but mainly hotel and tourist information on the Chinese version. <snip>

pcworld 16/03/2006

The right to accurate, easily available information. That one should've been in the Bill of Rights.