What Have They Done with the Real Google?

Google Blogoscoped shows a simple test to demonstrate how evil the new google.censored service is.  Here's an images.google.com query for "tiananmen" and here's an images.google.censored version of the same query.

This whole issue sticks in my craw badly.  I'll have much more to say about this some other time.

(Hat tip to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch.)

Comments

[Dom]

Censoring seems to be an in thing - or am I just noticing it more? Internet tends to allow for leaks, if anyone really cares. From Google's side, it's all to make a buck. We all know that places like Russia censor their media while claiming (half heartedly, of course) to be democratic. We also know that the US itself is not necessarily an angel in this regard.

I got a newsletter from one of my subscriptions that makes a daring claim on US censorship. I think it needs to be passed on, simply because it's a very concrete issue:

"
Dear subscriber to the United Transnational Republics! [I replaced the personal greeting - Dom]

...at the UNESCO conference in Buenos Aires, we had very many interesting discussions and the idea of the representation of citizens on a transnational level found a lot of interest. That is also true for our
proposed suggestion, whether it might be necessary at times of globalisation
to question the current role of the US-dollar as global hegemonic key currency, since the US-dollar is also being used to push the interests of some US American special interest groups. As an example we mentioned the costs to the US-economy of the war against Iraq, which is estimated to
be in the magnitude of 330 US-dollar per head of the world population -
while about half of the world's population has to live of less than two
dollars a day. Obviously, this currency system is better suited to finance
wars, than to fight poverty.

Shortly after our presentation at the UNESCO conference, the homepage of the United Transnational Republics (utnr.org) became unavailable. Our US American Internet Service Provider (hosting-pp.com) is not responding to our many complaints. The same ISP still answers swiftly to others, concerning complaints that are not related to utnr.org.

The slides of our UNESCO-presentation can be found on our German-hosted webpage, a text and a video version of which are in the making:
-> http://www.trnr.org/news/UTNR_at_IFSP.pdf
"

Now, maybe we don't agree (or at least not differentially) to the views of this one interest group, but it illustrates the possibility of sensorship. Still today, the website does not appear. Who knows, maybe UTNR didn't pay its bills. Or its part of a plan to make the US Government the boo man. Having met the person who writes the above newsletter, I tend to think the events were not rigged and were not incidental.

My suggestion is simply to use the resources on the web. Each of us needs a good filter to sift out the nonsense. At any rate, long live open source!

Dom

[Chris Mann]

Censorship? Sounds to me like they didn't pay their hosting bill.