ContentJanuary 31st, 2006 by DeWitt Clinton
My friend Chris wrote a beautifully simple application that displays the google.com searches (and image searches) side-by-side with the google.cn searches.
Visit the Censorship Viewer homepage, or go directly to the examples of “tiananmen” and “Falun Gong”.
Chris — you should add Yahoo and MSN to the mix as well.
January 31st, 2006 at 4:01 pm
That’s a good idea; I would like to add those two sometime soon. The JavaScript isn’t particularly complicated, so this shouldn’t be hard to extend to do that, actually.
I actually spent most of the time fighting a couple extremely minor yet catastrophic CSS problems and compatibility issues between Firefox, Safari, and IE. Having an IE debugging process that involves instant messaging friends on Windows computers to ask them to hit refresh over and over isn’t necessarily the best way to test and release software…
January 31st, 2006 at 4:41 pm
I know what you mean. It took me a few weekends to write Delancey, and twice that to debug cross-browser issues.
January 31st, 2006 at 10:25 pm
I was shown .com results in both iframes… perhaps because I’m currently “logged in” to Google?
February 2nd, 2006 at 10:50 pm
Google.cn web result #3 for “tiananmen”:
Eyeballing Tiananmen Square Massacre - [ 翻译此页 BETA ]
Students from more than forty universities march to Tiananmen Square in protest
of the April 26 editorial in the Communist … The bodies of dead civilians lie
among mangled bicycles near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square early June 4, 1989. …
cryptome.cn/tk/tiananmen-kill.htm
Strong suspicions (choose one or more)
1) I’m detected as a US user by Google, so I get more legit results.
2) Were I sitting at a Chinese internet terminal and somehow saw this result, clicking it would do nothing.
3) Or bring me to: http://www.chairmanmao.org/eng/
February 2nd, 2006 at 10:55 pm
Also, I wonder what results I’d get if I searched for “tiananmen” using Mandarin? And the relative frequency of Chinese internet users searching in English/Arabic characters rather than Mandarin glyphs?