Google Conforms to Chinese Censorship
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SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc.'s recently launched news service in China doesn't display results from Web sites blocked by that country's authorities, raising prickly questions for an online search engine that has famously promised to "do no evil."   Dynamic Internet Technology Inc., a research firm striving to defeat online censorship, conducted tests that found Google omits results from the government-banned sites if search requests are made through computers connecting to the Internet in China.    Steered by an identical search request, computers with a United States connection retrieved results from the sites blocked by China...
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Recognizing that internet censorship is hurting its business model in the Middle East and Asia, Google lobbies U.S. trade officials to do something.
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Google has reached an agreement with two groups representing authors and photographers in Belgium that had objected to the way the company indexes and displays their content on its Google News Web site.
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&quot;China is censoring Google News to force Internet users to use the Chinese version of the site which has been purged of the most critical news reports,&quot; said a statement from Reporters Without Borders.
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Yang Zhou is no cyberdissident, but recent curbs on his Web surfing habits by China's censors have him fomenting discontent about China's "Great Firewall".
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An effort by Beijing authorities to bar access to the Chinese Google News website would be a considerable setback for the US internet search company, which is seeking to expand its
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Internet users in Beijing and Shanghai said attempts to access Google&#160;and other search engines were successful Friday, despite claims on a U.S. blog that traffic to these&#160;sites was redirected&#160;to Chinese search engine Baidu.com.The claim first surfaced on TechCrunch, a U.S. blog that largely covers Internet startups before being picked up by other sites. The headline of that post alleged &quot;Baidu hijacking Google traffic In China,&quot; but offered no evidence to prove the claim apart from an undated, modified screenshot showing Baidu&#39;s Web page below the URL for Google Blogsearch.In a follow-up post, TechCrunch said &quot;new reports have surfaced that would indicate that China has unilaterally blocked all three major search engines in China and is redirecting all requests to Baidu.&quot; That report cited posts on other blogs, where users claimed to have been redirected from U.S. search sites to Baidu.A Google spokeswoman in Beijing did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.However, several Internet users -- four in Beijing and two in Shanghai -- reported on Friday morning that search engines operated by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, including Google Blogsearch, one of the sites reportedly most affected, were accessible. Attempts to reach these sites had not been redirected to Baidu, they said.Internet censorship is a serious problem in China, and regulators routinely&#160;block access to sites&#160;with content they don&#39;t like. But Chinese officials very rarely comment on censorship efforts, making it difficult for users to determine when a site has been blocked or is inaccessible for other reasons.Timing can be an important factor, with Chinese censors blocking access to some Web sites around politically sensitive dates, such as the June 4 anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and the Chinese Communist Party Congress, a political confab held once every five years to choose top leaders and set policy that is now underway in Beijing.Access to a search engine can also be blocked if a user searches for a politically sensitive word, such as a search for information on the banned Falungong religious sect.Tracking the ebb and flow of censorship efforts can be a challenge, as access to sites can be blocked and opened, seemingly by whim. On Wednesday, Wikipedia remained blocked in China and access to YouTube was shut off. But censors eased off on other sites, opening up access to Google&#39;s Blogspot blogging service and permitting users to view pictures on Flickr, which had been blocked even though the site was accessible in China.Even when Web sites are accessible in China, there can be moments when sites cannot be reached. For example, one of the Chinese Internet users in Beijing contacted for this story said he was unable to reach Google.com three days ago. Attempts to reach the site were not redirected to Baidu, and Google has been accessible during the last couple of days, he said.While the Chinese government may not be redirecting search-engine traffic to Baidu, censors did this in 2002, just before the previous Party Congress opened in Beijing. At that time, censors cut off access to Google and redirected traffic to several local search engines, including Baidu. However, the rerouting did not affect all users and did not appear to be done at a national level, analysts said at that time.&#160;
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Google, the internet business that made its mantra &quot;do no evil&quot;, is accused of pandering to attempts by the Chinese government to censor certain websites.
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Google&#39;s recently launched news service in China doesn&#39;t display results from Web sites blocked by that country&#39;s authorities, raising prickly questions
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China's government has strategically deployed the Internet to economic advantage, while clamping down on undesirable content and use.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc&#39;s recently launched news service in China doesn&#39;t display results from websites blocked by that country&#39;s authorities, raising prickly questions for an online search engine that has famously promised to &quot;do no evil.
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China watchers, get your scorecards out: Google Inc.'s YouTube is blocked, Wikipedia is still blocked, but, for the moment, Google blog site Blogspot.com is available and some pictures from Yahoo Inc.'s Flickr photos can once again be viewed.
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China is blocking access to the Web site Google News, media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said on Tuesday, and accused the US-based company of being complicit by filtering its Chinese-language site.
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The Internet in China is not as  restricted as sometimes believed in the West, with most  controls actually coming from sites practicing self-censorship,  an academic who studies the Chinese Web said on Thursday.
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(InfoWorld) - Fewer Chinese users are seeking out Google for its search services, according to a new report by the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC). According to the survey by China's official Internet number cruncher, 62.1 percent of Chinese users turned to local favorite Baidu for search, up from about 52 percent in 2005. Much of that growthÂ came at Google's expense. Baidu also had the highest brand recognition among search engines, with 86.5 percent of respondents identifying with the name, compared to only 64 percent for Google. CNNIC is an agency organization that monitors Internet use in China. Although its surveys are considered representative of Chinese Internet use, CNNIC rarely releases its methodology or sample size. However, for this survey, CNNIC said that it interviewed 4,500 total Chinese Internet users, 1,500 each in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and that the poll had a 5 percent margin of error. Google saw its market share drop from 33 percent last year to 25.3 percent in the current survey. While a majority of users identified with the brand, 31.9 percent recognized Google's Chinese name, "Gu Ge," or "Harvest Song," in Chinese, compared to 16.3 percent for its English name. Google did come out ahead in one respect: it was the first choice for more non-student users with an income of greater than 3,000 renminbi ($378) than its rivals, with 46.5 percent. Despite the rivalry between Baidu and Google, it seems that a bigger user search pie would benefit both: 76.3 percent of survey respondents said they used more than one search engine regularly for a given subject.
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Internet search engine Google has been accused of censoring the Chinese news service that it launched two weeks ago. Web hosting company Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT) reported that Google&#39;s Chinese news
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(InfoWorld) - Wikimedia Foundation's English-language site was accessible in China again on Friday, although its simplified Chinese-language site remained blocked. China censors Internet content that it finds objectionable, usually political material that relating to Taiwan or Tibetan independence, the Falun Gong cult, and occasionally pornography. Although the Web sites of most Western news outlets are available, the British Broadcasting Corp.'s news site remains a noteworthy exception. The English Wikipedia site has been available for various periods over the last three years, and has kept a record of those periods on its site. "Wikipedia is such a popular Web site that almost every foreigner who visits China may try to visit Wikipedia pages. I believe someone at [the Ministry of Information Industry] or another government ministry realized what bad PR a Wikipedia block produces," said Jeremy Goldkorn, editor of Danwei.org, a Beijing-based media and Internet site. "Once they had figured out the elegant solution of keeping the Chinese version blocked, and filtering out English Wikipedia pages about Tibet and other 'sensitive' subjects, they were happy to let us access the rest of Wikipedia," Goldkorn said. While English Wikipedia was unblocked, Yahoo Flickr photo service remained accessible from China. However, most photos on the site were blocked and could not be viewed by Chinese users.