Much has been made recently of Google's decision to censor China's search results as per the request of their government. Searching Google's Blog Search for 'google china censor' turns up 4 481 results as of now, which means that it's certainly made an impact on the 'blogosphere' (not that anyone gives a shit). However, it is quite interesting to take a look at the search results offered to the Chinese in comparison to the vanilla google.com results, for example:
http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen
http://www.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen
Apparently, this is the first image that comes to the mind of the Chinese government when presented with the phrase 'Tiananmen':
However, the image presented by the international version of Google looks a little more like this:
So, there's obviously a little bit of what could be called "foul play" going on.
I really don't have that strong a standpoint on this - even assuming that Google prevents access to any other version of the search results than google.cn for Chinese users, I still don't see what the big deal is. At least Google is providing a service in China - basically their only other option is to get blocked from China entirely, since it's the governments fault. However, a lot of people feel differently. You might want to have a look at the Slashdot articles on the topic, since there's a wide range of opinions presented in the comments, some of them quite insightful:
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