The confirmation adds credence to claims by Bill Xia, chief executive at Dynamic Internet Technology Inc., who claimed that his company had conducted tests that showed Google's new Chinese search service omits results from at least eight Chinese government-censored websites.
“That’s a problem because the Chinese people need to know there are alternative opinions from the Chinese government and there are many things being covered up by the government,” said Xia. “Users expect Google to return anything on the Internet. That’s what a search engine does.”
Google has acknowledged that its two-week-old Chinese language service, which draws from over a thousand sites, does leave out some banned sites from search results, but maintains that it does so in order to promote a better news search experience for its users.
“[Websites] may display improperly in our service or be inaccessible to users,” said Debbie Frost, a spokeswoman for Google. “We have not included links to a number of sources that are not accessible to mainland China Internet users.”
“These sources were not included because their sites are inaccessible and therefore their inclusion does not provide a good experience for our News users who are looking information,” Frost said, pointing out that eight websites accounts for less than 1 percent of the total sites searched by the Chinese news service.
Xia maintained that Google was actually aiding the Chinese government by excluding sites from its search results.
“These are the only places people can find this forbidden information and, by excluding them, Google is actively helping the Chinese government to enhance its ‘Matrix’,” Xia said.
According to analysts, Google’s inclusion of banned sites, or even a posted notice that says results could be affected by government censorship, would run the risk of the Chinese government restricting access to the Google search.
It would not be the first time that the Chinese government had blocked Google from its citizens. Two years ago, Google was mysteriously banned for a month in China.
A study conducted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School found that the Chinese government currently blocks access to human rights websites, AIDS-related healthcare sites, several well-known educational institutions including Caltech and MIT, news sites like the BBC and CNN, as well as many others.
“There is some evidence that the government has attempted to prevent the spread of unwanted material by preventing the spread of the Internet itself, but a concomitant desire to capture the economic benefits of networked computing has led to a variety of strategies to split the difference,” researchers concluded.
According to the study, 9.3 percent of non-sexually explicit sites tested were blocked in China. The study also found that 13.4 percent of sexually explicit sites were blocked by the Chinese government, compared with the 70 percent of sexually explicit sites blocked by commercial filtering software and the 86.2 percent of sites blocked by the Saudi Arabian government.
