T-Salon

I was reading (in a rather non-linear fashion) John Battelle's The Search over the weekend. The book charts how the search industry came into being over the years and tells the story of the rise of Google. It has been a very exciting reading so far. Somewhere on page 206, there is a section on "the China Question" (or the China business dilemma of "to censor or not to censor") that Google faced because the company has a corporate motto of "Don't Be Evil". (That section alone is worth reading, as the story is framed from a somewhat different angle than most news reports in mainstream media.)

Then there comes today the news (via Financial Times) that Google finally came up with an answer to the question. The company has setup its own domain in China - www.google.cn.

"Google is to launch a China-based version of its internet search service that will actively censor results in order to avoid angering the country’s Communist government.

[...]

Google, famous for its “Don’t Be Evil” philosophy, is seeking to soften potential criticism by promising to inform Chinese users when search results are censored, something other China-based search services do not do."

Update: Google.cn is now live. A Chinese described it as an eunuch version. A number of people have tested it out and found out what Google censors in China and how the filtering works.

I have searched a couple of "famous" rural protests. The results looked sanitized.

Further reading:
Greg Walton has more on British press reports on news.
Rebecca Mackinnon has some recommendations on how Google can do the right thing within the regulatory boundaries it's in.