Google in China


 * Since the Aurora attacks, Google only has a presence in Hong Kong and Google.cn is now redirecting to their Hong Kong site. Hong Kong is currently not censored.

Andrew McLaughlin, Google's senior policy counsel, explained Google's approach to serving Chinese users in the Google Blog in January 2006.

He said that Google.com was down around 10% of the time for users in China, Google News service is never available, and Google Images is accessible only half the time. They launched Google.cn in response, but Google said would "remove certain sensitive information from our search results".

McLaughlin said that Google has debated whether entering the Chinese market at this point in history could be consistent with Google's mission and values.


 * "Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely."

McLaughlin stated that when sensitive information is removed from the search results, they would disclose this to users.

Gmail and Blogger are not yet offered on Google.cn.

Examples of censorship

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 * site:wikipedia.org+tiananmen : No results (16800 results on Google.com)
 * Screenshots of censored results by Philipp Lenssen.

Related news and blog posts

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 * Links to the Google post
 * Search for "Google in China" on Google's Blogsearch
 * "No booze or jokes for Googlers in China" by Declan McCullagh  on News.com
 * "How Google Censors Itself For China & Paid Exclusion As Being Evil" by Danny Sullivan on SearchEngineWatch
 * "China, Internet Behavior, and Censorship" by Andrew Goodman on Traffick
 * "The Real Irony Here..." by John Battelle
 * "Why Google in China makes sense" on news.bbc.co.uk
 * "Google in China: degrees of evil" by Rebecca MacKinnon
 * "Google.cn in China" on GlobalVoices
 * "Google Follows Chinese Rules" on Radio Free Asia
 * "Understanding how Google.cn filters" by Ethan Zuckerman