Bloggers discover hole in Google's Chinese wall

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 31 Jan 2006 at 17:36

Enterprising bloggers have already found workarounds to Google's attempts at censorship for its Chinese version.

Paul Boutin says that he and Allan Schaffer discovered that while Google may have successfully filtered out any results that the Chinese authorities might deem controversial for certain keywords, it has been done on the understanding that the search terms were spelled correctly.

However, it turns out that for incorrectly spelled searches, clever Google knows what you really meant and serves up the results without applying the filtering.

Thus, image searches for Tiananmen throws up innocuous images of fountains and temples; type in Tianenmen, Tienanmen or Tiananman and you see tanks and protesters.

There's no certainty that Google will let this lie. Its remit is to identify and remove such controversial content from the reach of users on its google.cn service. The Chinese authorities don't give the company a list of sites it does not want viewed, but rather it has to make a judgement call based on criteria it is given as to what content it will block.