Yahoo! clear worst offender in censorship tests on search engines

Reports Without Borders has been doing some testing of the various Beijing-authorized search engines. While the results were mostly expected, there was some surprise with just how censored Yahoo.cn is – even worse than tha “homegrown” baidu.com:

“The press freedom organisation is particularly shocked by the scale of censorship on yahoo.cn. first because the search results on “subversiveâ€? key words are 97% pro-Beijing. It is therefore censoring more than its Chinese competitor Baidu. Above all, the organisation was able to show that requests using certain terms, such as 6-4 (4 June, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), or “Tibet independence”, temporarily blocked the search tool. If you type in one of these terms on the search tool, first you receive an error message. If you then go back to make a new request, even with a neutral key word, yahoo.cn refuses to respond. It takes one hour before the service can be used again. This method is not used by any other foreign search tools; only Baidu uses the same technique.”

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



One Responseto “Yahoo! clear worst offender in censorship tests on search engines”

1. Ancient Clown says:

   June 30, 2006 at 8:51 am

   I have had reports come back that I too, am being censored/blocked in various countries around the world. Mine is a site designed to help awaken the mind. I freely share what I describe as a ‘Poetic Idea‘. I humbly give you an Instrumental X-CHANGE and the Art of Wire Tree-making.
   “To give a person a tree is to give them a present, but to teach a person how to make a tree is a gift for life.”
   your humble servant,
   Ancient Clown