An open letter to Google's Founders regarding the censorship of search results in China :"During the National Day holiday week in 2002, when Google.com was blocked in China for the first time, Chinese Google users made an online protest spontaneously. They appealed to free the purer search engine wave by wave. Its seemed its also the first time grassroots power was demonstrated in China on Internet. You can imagine how eager they are to have a complete Internet instead of a shrunken one. At last, people won, Google backed. However, after 4 years, we started to question whether we should continue to support Google. Many users here were disappointed when they found Google.cn filtered many keywords. The compromise remarks by you in Davos made us more frustrated. Seems you are adopting self-censorship which hurts those loyal users a lot which also devalue your motto of "non-evil"."
Issues to keep in mind:
- Yahoo and Microsoft are doing it too in order to continue their business operations in China
- Google is alerting the searcher that the results are filtered because the ghost of Mao is alive and kicking and said so
- Google's losing market share in China's search market next to Sina.com due to censorship concerns, while local users are forgetting that Sina.com too is censoring the results, even worse, not even crawling as deep as Google is in respect to the quality of search results
- U.S Congressman Chris Smith has the issue on his agenda
- Technology companies are seeking government assistance on how to stop the ongoing censorship themselves
- The complete list of censored search results is worth going through
- Google's and Yahoo's shareholders are fighting back
- The Great Firewall is cracking from within with banned journalists now running the largest blogging network in China
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