You can read the meat of Google's offical response to its critics here: Official Google Blog: Google in China
What is interesting to look at in the whole of Google's response to criticism of their explicit acceptance of China's filtering policy is how they understand what their mission is:
Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced. By launching Google.cn and making a major ongoing investment in people and infrastructure within China, we intend to change that.
Here, Google is clearly prioritizing quantity over quality, not surprising, but interesting that Google is framing their position as improving internet access as a whole. Yet, clearly what this position overlooks is that the point of the criticisms is that the quality of the content that they are providing is compromised. Google is suggesting that any content is better than the spotty service that they claim is the majority of the experience in China. Regardless of the truth value here, Google is trying to change the terms of debate. While they are being criticized for the quality of the information that they are delivering (in my case, particularly the legitimization of authoritarian propaganda), they answer that access is better than no access without addressing the substance of the criticism.
Chinese regulations will require us to remove some sensitive information from our search results.
Now, how information about the Tiananmen Square uprising constitutes "sensistive" is beyond me. What is disturbing about this situation is not having access to the depths of the filtering process- it is unclear what is being filtered out and why. In doing periodic searches, I haven't been able to consistently see what's being filtered and why. It maybe the case that because my IP isn't from China, I'm getting different results now. Using the following search terms, I figured I'd be able to produce significant differences in searches:
great leap forward
Jung Chang
Dalai Lama
Tibet
tiananmen square massacre
china starvation
For "great leap forward", the only document that seemed significant on the first page of results missing was this article from the BBC which is no hot bed of controversy.
I anticipated Jung Chang to produce different results, particularly with her arguments around the death toll during the Great Leap Forward. Yet, seemingly most of the results were fairly similar. Of the rest, the only one that produces extreme differences is "tiananmen square massacre", but because of my lack of Chinese, it is virtually impossible to evaluate the content on these pages. Because Google is presumably doing prioritization of pages based on native language, the only way to really evaluate what Google is doing is to actually do a content analysis. "china starvation" also produced significantly different results, though again, limited by language, it is hard to do real analysis of these things.
I think if Google wanted to save some face, they'd disclose the filtering technology that they are using and ways in which they are weighting results in China. Yet, the following demonstration proves hard to stomach. This is an even more extreme example than i did earlier:
These searches are for "tiananmen square massacre" here and here respectively.
How much these results are skewed by language is unclear to me, but it seems hard to think that this is not the ugly face of a filter. Anybody want to offer up what the search would be in Chinese?
Update
This has some good information on Google censorship.
This is a good example of what Google actually censors when you search for "mein kampf" on Google France and Germany.
This is an appolgetic article, though contains some good information.
Update 2
This has a great list of terms that are being censored by Google.
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