Speling

Paul Boutin writes:

Paul Boutin : Chinese Google filter only works if you can spell. google.cn image search for Tiananmen: Gate of Heavenly Peace. google.cn image search for Tianenmen, Tienanmen and Tiananman: Tanks, tanks, more tanks. Try it yourself: Compare the same image search on google.com and google.cn. Only the results for "tiananmen" are different.

Comments

[contrapositive]

"Only the results for 'tiananmen' are different."

For now.

[Alopex Lagopus]

Right on, let's go ahead and debug the damn thing! Let's make sure the censors fix their filters!

[Jonathan King]

Alopex Lagopus writes:
>
> Right on, let's go ahead and debug the damn thing! Let's make
> sure the censors fix their filters!

I share your disgust at the notion that Google would assent to helping the Chinese government with their program. But I think it's fair to point out that the program really is pure folly. There are tens or hundreds of millions of really smart Chinese (depending on how you choose your threshold) and the notion that any search filter would pose more than an incovenience in the even the short run strikes me as being waaay too optimistic about how such things work.

But that said, I suggest that you and all of us do our part. Let's take the best images of Tiananmen Square and rename them "mao.jpg", link to them heavily from all of our best sites, and then let a thousand jpegs bloom. Or something like that...

[mg]

The results for any typical image search is different.

[mike]

A very poorly censored Google will be a great tool for a lot of Chinese people. It's especially better than no google at all. I wish more people would realize this.

[evan]

"But that said, I suggest that you and all of us do our part. Let's take the best images of Tiananmen Square and rename them "mao.jpg", link to them heavily from all of our best sites, and then let a thousand jpegs bloom. Or something like that..."

i like the way he thinks....

[John]

It is amazing and interesting to me that state/corporate power can be so easily subverted by typos. As a
grammar/spelling nazi, it never occurred to me...!!!
Of course there's probably some worm in a directorate somewhere working on google(tm) spellcheck.

[a different chris]

I have a sad feeling that some Chinese bureaucrat somewhere can explain to you with a very straight face that Tiananmen is "dwelling on bad news" and "undermining our efforts to [not have Tiananmens]" and that it's near treasonous not to report the "good news" that there aren't any tanks there today!!

Honestly I wonder if the US and China elites aren't running an experiment - that if you supply enough bread and circuses the people won't mind a pretty heavy-fisted, authoritiarian government. We have plenty of bread and circuses so on this side of the Pacific we're slowing tightening the grip of the government to see when/if the populace starts to feel uncomfortable. So far so good, if your a Cheney/Alito type.

The ChiComs have heavy-fisted authoritarian government polished to a fine sheen, and the people don't care for it so much, so they're ramping up the bread and circuses to see if that can be enough to damp things down to little more than bit of muttering among the populace.

Worked for Rome, at least for a period longer than the US has existed.

[jim]

I'm sure that Google is filtering precisely what the Chinese authorities request be filtered: no more, no less.

[Doug]

I just tried this and see the same results for both google.com and google.cn. Maybe the filter is off? (I just copied and pasted the spellings into both engines and they look the same.)

[hirvi]

So buying hundreds of billions of Chinese goods etc is right, but selling a them tweakable search engine is wrong?

Excuse me, but I don't 'get it'.

[Dan Ryan]

Don't be any more evil than you have to be.

[NinjaPlease]

I'd like to point out that Chairmen Mao claimed "The capitalists will sell us the nails to build their coffins."

Economists are not allowed to be moral, if they are true devotees to Pareto Optimal buying & selling.

Capitalism tells us that it's OK for China to ask for help in censoring public information it does not want disseminated. China has MANY COMPANIES that would like to be their censor, for profit.

Profits are better than life.

However, according to Secretary Snow, removing more trade barriers with China is the only way to allow for a democracy there and to decrease their human rights violations.

[NinjaPlease]

If you have a problem with Google & Microsoft's and many others who do business with the Chinese government, regardless of what it is, then YOU ARE NOT LIBERTARIAN.

[pat]

To be fair to google, people in China are not made worse off with google.cn -- the search results from google.com are filtered by Chinese government agencies thus few of the tanks you see in a google.com search will appear in a computer in China. At least with google.cn, users get a warning which says that some of the search results are not shown in compliance with local laws.

[ArC]

Yes, mispellings are found, that's cute, but I would have thought most Chinese in China searching google.cn would be searching using Chinese, not English.