On 14 Feb 2006, at 16:44, conor at discuskeeping.com wrote:
> Flames welcome.
Not a flame, merely wish to point out that Google isn't removing
anything from the search results on google.cn which wouldn't be
blocked anyway by the Chinese government firewall. However, note
that the government firewall, upon detection of a banned term, *also*
drops the connection and blacklists the sourceIP:destIP tuple for ten
minutes. This leads to a very bad user experience while using
external search engines (such as google.com). Using google.cn gives
a better search because it's much harder to fall into this tarpit,
and a notice is displayed when results are removed. Clever users
can, of course, try variations on their search to see whether some
information might leak - the tarpit on the main government firewall
makes this very difficult.
In, short, I believe that Google.cn is a net benefit for Chinese
internet users, and I've yet to see any convincing proposal for
alternative action by Google which would have been better for the
Chinese people.
Colm (emphatically not speaking on behalf of Google)
--
Colm Buckley / colm at tuatha.org / +353 87 2469146 / www.colm.buckley.name
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