Chinese bloggers: GOOGLE Eunuch Version published today

 News Images 2006 01 200601252230China1 From China based Zhengweekly blog (征周刊号外): (translated by CDT)

Facing the huge (Chinese) market, GOOGLE finally softened.

Although it is not so soft, yet.

Today Google published its Chinese version: www.google.cn. It utilized key words filtering on this new page, so many websites which the Chinese government does not want Chinese netizens to see now cannot be searched.

As a trade off, the cache pages of searched results can still be visited.

This sentence which appears under the search result makes me feel slightly feel comforted: “In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy.” At least they did not try to cheat ……

And, the non-castrated version of Google still can be visited. The Google company statement is understandable and can be accepted: “While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.”

But I have heard some terrible news, which I cannot verify:

In the future, for mainland users, only the Eunuch version will be available. If you type in www.google.com, the system will automatically switch you to www.google.cn

That will be terrible. If Google does this, it will be dammed. This company that self-claims “don’t do evil” will become the son of Satan completely. It will not only be condemned by global users, but will also be marginalized in China.

Also from Chinese blogger Cathayan’s Blog on the 27th Floor:



Obviously, this event will be seen as going against the company’s (Google’s) mission statement, it will be put into the same category as what was done by MSN and Yahoo China. Indeed, this is the same kind of thing.

But I also think that our own matters must not depend on others, whether individuals or companies. What belongs to us we can only go fight to get by ourselves. Compared with the whole website and service being blocked, maintaining the services used by the majority of netizens, including daily gossip, low taste, nonsense, pretending or real angry youth, sexy ladies etc… can also be used for more significant purposes, especially when it comes to grass roots communication platform such as MSN Spaces.



Google is apparently still caught in the conflict between idealism and reality, and has not finally decided its behavior, because it has not provided all its products and services to Simple Characters Chinese users. And it said that it will not provide Gmail and blog services to us, to avoid the “risk of revealing others personal information.” Maybe we can believe that Google still maintained some idealism, thank Heavens.

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