Trusting google as it censors for China

[DireStrike]

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/1/25/22020/4062

I've worried about how dependant people have become on google. It is THE search engine, far superior to all the rest. If you want info that you can't find elsewhere, you google it. When they became a full-fledged traded company, they didn't immediately go corrupt, but I guess it was only a matter of time.

As kuro says in the link above, my immediate thoughts were - if they will meet one government's censorship stance to get a some more marketshare, why not another's? After all, according to their reasoning, a censored information providing product is better than no product at all.

Well no, google. No it is not. It's better that people should at least KNOW that they're not getting information that isn't approved by their overlords. What you are doing is masking the censorship, and letting the government control its people's thoughts from the shadows.

Unfortunately I must keep using google for now - nothing else compares. But the first thing I am going to search for is "google china greed hypocrisy". Maybe if enough of us do it, it'll show up on their radar screens.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

1. Suddenly I find myself not quite as drawn

to Google as I once was. I thought they were a progressive company with amazing ideas for worker production, etc.

But now...not so much.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

2. You're going to see this more and more in the future.

And not just from Google. Google just happens to be very forward-thinking with respect to the Chinese market.

[populistdriven]

3. What Google did (they don't censor China)

Before the Chinese could do a search on Google and the Chinese government censored sites would still show up in the results but the when the Chinese clicked on them they were blocked by the government.

Google simply moved their indexing servers inside the firewall so now they don't index the blocked sites that the Chinese couldn't get to anyways.

The only difference is that before the Chinese could use Google to tell which sites were blocked and now they can't. They also may have been able to use Google's caching to defeat the firewall.

But the Chinese government told Google they would be completed blocked from China unless they moved their servers inside the firewall (inside the country).

There are still 1000 ways for the Chinese to get around the firewall.

All Google did was move their indexing servers inside the Country. They don't actively block or censor unless the site violates their terms of service by using shady tactics usually employed by pron sites. (this is what got bmw.de deleted from their index)