I’ve just hacked together GoogleCompare, its a PHP-screen-scraper that compares googles Chinese results to its American results. Please note that I haven’t spent long on the script and may have many bugs, check anything you are relying on independently.
As I’ve developed it I’ve noticed constant switching, Google is obviously doing work on adjusting things. Sometimes Wikipedia is first result:
and sometimes its not there at all. The chinese Google has a completely different ranking system so with GoogleCompare you say I want to see which pages of the first X on Google.com were not in the first Y in Google.cn. In general, the amount of pages shown increases as X increases and decreases as Y increases.
Please don’t bombard Google with it as it can send up to 4 requests to Google per refresh.
It is sinister that BBC News seems to be blocked but, other things like www.bbc.co.uk do eventually show up but are far down the list because Google does not consider them important to Chinese users. Many of the results are false positives (e.g. Amazon comes up alot). Never the less I think its a useful application to monitor the level of censorship.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
No tags
No comments yet.
Leave a Reply
<< Spam Poetry
