MCLC: Google to alert users to censorship

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: James McMath <mcmathja at gmail.com>
Subject: Google to alert users to censorship
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (6/1/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/02/world/asia/google-to-alert-users-to-chine
se-censorship.html

Google to Alert Users to Chinese Censorship
By Michael Wines

BEIJING ‹ Google has quietly upped the ante in a long-running dispute with
Chinese authorities over censorship, adding a software twist to its search
page that warns users when they type a search term whose results are
likely to be blocked in China.

The change, unveiled without publicity Thursday on one of Google¹s
corporate blogs, is described as an improvement in the search experience
for mainland Chinese users, who can be disconnected from Google without
explanation when they try to open a Web page that was found using a
censored search term.

But it also seems likely to irritate Chinese officials, who already have
employed an array of techniques to punish the company since a clash over
censorship led Google to move its servers to Hong Kong in January 2010.

Google¹s market share in mainland China has plunged to about 17 percent
from 35.6 percent, according to Analysys International, an Internet
consulting firm specializing in China, as users grew weary of blocked Web
sites and timeouts that can bar them from conducting new searches for more
than a minute.

The announcement deftly sidestepped any allusion to censorship, saying
only that users had been frustrated by error messages and disconnections
and that Google engineers had "taken a long, hard look at our systems and
have not found any problems."

"However, after digging into user reports, we¹ve noticed that these
interruptions are closely correlated with searches for a particular subset
of terms," it stated. "So starting today we¹ll notify users in mainland
China when they enter a keyword that may cause connection issues."

The blog post, by Alan Eustace, a senior vice president who oversees
search services, stated that the company had analyzed 350,000 popular
search terms to find words that were "disruptive queries." Now, when users
enters one of those terms and try to begin a search, they are presented
with a yellow box stating that searching for the term "may temporarily
break your connection to Google. This interruption is outside Google¹s
control." Users are then given a chance to enter a different search term.

Censorship often spills over from sensitive topics to searches that would
ordinarily be bland. The blog cites the example of the Chinese character
for river, or jiang, which causes an error message or a timeout on Google.
The reason is that it is also the surname of the former Chinese leader
Jiang Zemin ‹ whose name, like those of many other leaders, is banned from
Google searches in China.

Users of Chinese search services like the popular Baidu, on the other
hand, can search for "jiang" without difficulty, but only because
government censors have already sanitized the results of a search to
delete any sensitive Web pages. The result is a list of pages that gives
no indication of censorship.

Chinese censors are unable to fine-tune Google¹s search results because
they are produced by servers outside mainland China, and thus out of the
censors¹ reach. So the government resorts instead to blocking any search
or page that includes an offending term.

Mr. Eustace said that users could often get around censorship by entering
the banned term in English or Pinyin, the romanized Chinese writing system.

A Google spokesman who asked not to be identified declined to elaborate on
Google¹s decision to warn users of blocked terms. But there is an
approximate precedent: Before 2010, when Google maintained its servers in
mainland China and its search results were sanitized, it included a note
at the bottom of Web pages noting that some results had been blocked.

The spokesman also declined to address the prospect that the Chinese
authorities might retaliate for Google¹s action. Among other issues, the
company has experienced unexplained problems with its popular Gmail
service in recent years, and its Google+ social networking service has
been blocked.