Censorship in China is an issue that dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. From international trade to domestic issues, censorship has often been at the forefront of concerns for this communist nation (not to mention the rest of us). Just as we “Google” here in the states, China has their own censored search engine called Baidu. It is China’s leading search engine, and just like Google, Yahoo!, and Live Search, Baidu can search websites, audio files, and images. It also has an online collaboratively built encyclopedia, similar to our Wikipedia. Baidu provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files, and is in many ways a Google clone. The Chinese language version of Baidu filters controversial material from its search results in order to follow the policies of Internet censorship in China.
This is upsetting to United States search titans – who have big potential for economic gains in the Chinese ad market, but are confined to acting within both local laws and US copyright laws. Further distressing is that they have failed to take the lead in a market that will have more broadband users than the United States in the next 12-18 months.
Possibly most interesting about this issue is that it’s not for lack of Chinese consumer interest that Google, Yahoo!, and Live Search are failing in China. It appears that China has unilaterally blocked them, and is redirecting all requests to Baidu. This redirect also applies to YouTube.com. Although censorship may be partially to blame for the ban of US-based search sites, the redirect to Baidu could indicate that there is an economic motive behind it all. This and other issues have many people in the Search Community crying foul – saying if the Chinese Government was serious about censorship alone, there would be reports of pages not found/blocked messages, not redirects to Baidu.
Time and national relations may tell otherwise, but for now don’t expect to be able to Google anything on your next business trip to China.
1 response so far ↓
1 Joe // Oct 22, 2007 at 4:22 pm
This is really interesting. I studied there for a while, and we were able to Google whenever we pleased… however, we used to find it somewhat entertaining how different the results were on the Google in China and the Google in the United States for the search term “Tiananmen Square.”
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