Google responds, on their blog, to the criticism they have received due to the omission of banned news sources in the PRC. I though that this was worth mentioning, particularly due to the last line in the second paragraph (emphasis mine) as it reveals to a significant degree, what this is really about. As I see it, this pretty much makes google a spin machine for the government of the PRC. Thoughts?
Google is committed to providing easy access to as much information as possible. For Internet users in China, Google remains the only major search engine that does not censor any web pages. However, it's clear that search results deemed to be sensitive for political or other reasons are inaccessible within China. There is nothing Google can do about this.
For last week's launch of the Chinese-language edition of Google News, we had to decide whether sources that cannot be viewed in China should be included for Google News users inside the PRC. Naturally, we want to present as broad a range of news sources as possible. For every edition of Google News, in every language, we attempt to select news sources without regard to political viewpoint or ideology. For Internet users in China, we had to consider the fact that some sources are entirely blocked. Leaving aside the politics, that presents us with a serious user experience problem. Google News does not show news stories, but rather links to news stories. So links to stories published by blocked news sources would not work for users inside the PRC — if they clicked on a headline from a blocked source, they would get an error page. It is possible that there would be some small user value to just seeing the headlines. However, simply showing these headlines would likely result in Google News being blocked altogether in China.
We also considered the amount of information that would be omitted. In this case it is less than two percent of Chinese news sources. On balance we believe that having a service with links that work and omits a fractional number is better than having a service that is not available at all. It was a difficult tradeoff for us to make, but the one we felt ultimately serves the best interests of our users located in China. We appreciate your feedback on this issue.
1. It seems to me that Google, although with some limitations, is a lot better than no Google at all for the chinese people. I am betting that is the way Google is looking at it too.
Today there is a lot of sites poping up that the chinese goverment isn't able to stop (at least not right away), and most of that is probably accessible through Google.
I am fairly sure that Google much rather would have wanted to be able to publish in the chinese market without any censorship what-so-ever.
Posted at 4:38AM on Dec 19th 2005 by jarle