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Google's Chinese firewall blocks more than Yahoo!
Blacklist includes sites on teen pregnancy and sexual health...

By Declan McCullagh

Published: Friday 27 January 2006

Google's new China search engine not only censors many websites that question the Chinese government but it goes further than similar services from Microsoft and Yahoo! by targeting teen pregnancy, homosexuality, dating, beer and jokes.

In addition, silicon.com sister site CNET News.com has found that contrary to Google founder Sergey Brin's promise to inform users when their search results are censored, the company frequently filters out sites without revealing it.

Some of the blackballing appeared to be a mistake. The University of Pennsylvania's entire engineering school server - which hosted one Falun Gong site - was blocked from Google's Google.cn China site. So was an Essex County website, which sports the word "sex" - as in "Essex" - in its domain name. Google.cn also doesn't display search.msn.com to someone who's hunting for the rival Microsoft service.

And the results can be haphazard. A search in English on "Tiananmen Square" turned up some sites but not others. Tsquare.tv, a site devoted to the protest and subsequent massacre, was filtered out but Wikipedia's write-up appeared. And an image search revealed the iconic photo of a student blocking a column of tanks before the 1989 massacre. Search results also appear to vary depending on whether they're done in English or in Chinese characters.

Google representatives responded to queries by saying some website blockages are human errors that should be expected when any new service is introduced, and others represent a concerted attempt to comply with Chinese censorship laws. By Thursday, a handful of blackballed sites, such as the engineering school and Budweiser.com, had been cleared to appear on Google.cn, though Guinness.com had not.

When launching its China-based search site this week, Google defended its decision to comply with the dictates of China's ruling Communist Party by saying the new service expands access to information for Chinese users. But its choice has been controversial.

Google's China launch comes as scrutiny of search engine providers' commitment to civil liberties is increasing and criticism of their choice to comply with repressive regimes is growing. The US Congress is planning hearings in the next few weeks, and on Wednesday, Republican Chris Smith blasted Google for "collaborating with [democracy activists'] persecutors".

Because access from China to the US Google.com site is limited for financial and political reasons, the vast majority of Chinese are forced to turn to domestic search engines instead. Google's Brin has estimated that Google.com is available to only half of the country's users, and other reports say that when search terms such as "Tiananmen Square" are typed in on Google.com, the site immediately becomes unreachable for a few hours.

A spokesman for the Washington, DC-based National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, said it was "discouraging" to find his group has been banned from Google.cn, especially since it hasn't been blackballed by Yahoo!'s China site or by Microsoft's Chinese version of MSN.

A search for "teen pregnancy" through Google's US website lists the group's homepage as the first result. But in an identical search through Google.cn, the campaign's website is not listed. Google does not inform users that it was deleted.

Google said in a statement on Wednesday that its filters are "intended to block the minimum required to comply with [Chinese] laws and regulations".

In a second statement, the company added: "As with most brand-new services, our launch is immediately followed by a process of identifying and correcting bugs or other technical issues. Google.cn is no exception, and we will continue to refine our processes to ensure that we are filtering the minimum necessary, and that notices are properly displayed in all instances results have been filtered." (Google refuses to make its list of off-limits websites public.)

The buggy Chinese filtering stands out as a rare black-eye for a company that prides itself on superior search technology, has a $126bn market capitalisation and boasts on its payroll one of the world's highest concentrations of computer science doctoral degrees.

A September 2000 Chinese government directive says that internet content providers must restrict information that may "harm the dignity and interests of the state" or that foster "evil cults" or "damage the social stability". Alcohol and teen pregnancy sites are not listed as off-limits categories.

To test the effectiveness of search censorship in China, silicon.com sister site CNET News.com wrote a computer program to check 4,600 internet host names compiled by the Open Net Initiative for use in earlier tests of Chinese filtering. Websites that were indexed by Google.com and MSN.com but not their Chinese counterparts were identified. Only a subset was tested against Yahoo! because its Chinese website was frequently non-responsive, and the program tested only host names, not individual web pages.

The results showed that Google blocked the most sites, filtering out about 13 per cent of the host names tested compared with MSN's 10 per cent. But while both MSN and Google deleted pornography and political sites from search listings, Google also singled out more humour sites and more sites related to homosexuality - and it was the only search engine to block information related to alcohol, dating and marijuana.

Danene Sorace, director of the Network for Family Life Education at Rutgers University, said she's not pleased that the university's Sex, etc. site is being filtered out by Google.cn. "The challenge, of course, is that sexual health information often gets mixed up in pornography," Sorace said. "What we are about is about sexual health, and that often gets lost when you apply these kinds of filtering programs."

Google.cn's censorship was not just over-inclusive. Like the other search engines, it frequently was under-inclusive as well. The pro-marijuana site HighTimes.com is blocked but its alternate domain name of 420.com was not (420 is a slang term associated with marijuana use). Bacardi.com was missing but the company's French, German, Canadian, and Italian country-code sites were still available. While Penthouse.com and Playboy.com were invisible, searching on the magazines' titles offered an Amazon.com subscription link.

Mickey Spiegel, senior researcher in the Asia division of Human Rights Watch (blocked by Google and Yahoo! but not Microsoft), said Google.cn was "a step backwards in terms of freedom of expression issues".

Spiegel said: "It will leave the Chinese populace with less and less ability to, in a sense, think for themselves about some of the issues facing them today. They are going to have a restricted diet of info and that is going to colour how they view the world. It's a big story, and it's a stain on their image."

Adrienne Verrilli, communications director for the Sexuality Information and Education Council (blocked from Google.cn), said valuable, life-saving websites often get blocked in censorship sweeps.

Verrilli said: "I guess the Chinese people aren't allowed to get good sexual health information. That's unfortunate and disappointing. We have such good information for the Chinese, who are going to be steeped in their own HIV/AIDs crisis very shortly."

Google's Brin told Fortune magazine this week that "if there's any kind of material blocked by local regulations, we put a message to that effect at the bottom of the search engine". Tests show, however, that the message tends to appear only for political sites such as Tibet and Falun Gong, and not the other categories of information censored from Google.cn.

CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report

Declan McCullagh writes for CNET News.com