China: Yahoo! Worst Offender in Censorship Tests on Search Engines

["Fergie" <fergdawg () netzero net>]

Not directly related to anything, but interesting.

Via Reporters sans Frontières.

[snip]

Reporters Without Borders said it found Yahoo! to be the clear worst
offender in censorship tests the organisation carried out on Chinese
versions of Internet search engines Yahoo!, Google, MSN as well as
their local competitor Baidu.

The testing threw up significant variations in the level of filtering.
While yahoo.cn censors results as strictly as baidu.cn, search engines
google.cn and the beta version of msn.cn let through more information
from sources that are not authorized by the authorities.

While Microsoft has just said it does not operate censorship, Reporters
Without Borders found that the Chinese version of its search engine
displays similar results to those of google.cn, which admits to
filtering its content. Searches using a "subversive" key word display
on average 83% of pro-Beijing websites on google.cn, against 78% on
msn.cn. By contrast, the same type of request on an uncensored search
engine, like google.com, produces only 28% of pro-Beijing sources of
information. However, Microsoft like Google appears not to filter
content by blocking certain keywords but by refusing to include sites
considered illegal by the authorities.

[snip]

More:
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=18015

Related:
http://homer.informatics.indiana.edu/censearchip/


- ferg


--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg () netzero net or fergdawg () sbcglobal net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/


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