Internet Censorship

Internet censorship has become quite an issue. It seems that the most commonly used sites on the internet are search engines. So, I went to a few different search engines to see what results I would get by typing in the exact same terms into all of them. This way, we kind of get a sense of what search engines censor more than others. The search engines that I compared were Google, Bing, Baidu, and Google.cn.

The four search terms that I used were:
1. uss yorktown nt
2. google china censorship
3. Tiananmen Square
4. Taiwan independence

The first term I searched was "uss yorktown nt". I seemed to get somewhat similar results on all the search engines. I found a lot of information about the USS Yorktown that was used in WWII, and about the newer Navy ship from 1982. It seemed that the Google.cn site had more information about the NT failure than the other links. However, the first few results I got on this search engine were the same as the ones I go on Google.


The second term I searched was "google china censorship". I found that Bing's search results were mostly news organization pages. I also found that Google and Google.cn had somewhat of the same search results again. I did find a lot of blog entries about this topic though. The blogs were all very opinionated as this is a subject that people have many different views on.


The third term I searched was "Tiananmen Square" which offered very different search results. The two Chinese search engines Google.cn and Baidu had a lot of information about the culture and history of the square. However when I went to Google and Bing I found more search results about the protests that have gone on in the square. It seems as if the Chinese search engines came up with more positive results than with the American search engines which also had negative ones.


The fourth term I searched was "Taiwan independence". I got results on Bing and on Google that were about the Taiwan Independence Movement, which were clearly lacking from the other two search engines. The Chinese search engines are obviously censoring the information that one can find on their sites. They seem to exclude a lot of information from them; however, you would not know this unless you viewed other search engines from other countries that may not censor as much material. It's clear there are certain things that almost any country's government does not want people to see.