theMediaman.com

What started off as an admittingly shallow search into a news story about Janet Jackson and the popular web searches for 2005, concluded in some upsetting (yet not wholy unpredictable) discoveries.

In this article are outlined some of the fastest growing sites on the Internet. Among the top three is Baidu, the “Chinese Google”. Literally meaning “a hundred degrees” (or ’searches’) and referring to an old poem about a pretty lady, I was more intregued by exactly how much the Chinese government had limited the stream of information. I’ve been disturbed in the past year by Google, Yahoo! and MSN all agreeing to filter results queried by computers in China, limiting the flow of information. The modern synonym for ‘Free Speech’, Blogger, has also been largely banned.

With full access to Baidu.com, I decided to do some searches to see if all this talk about limited content was true.

Well, most of my searches DID come back with results (but not all… more on that later). However, the links provided were decidedly skewwed. For example:

The predictable first search was for the phrase, “Freedom of Speech”. The first link was to an essay on how Freedom of Speech is not entirely “Free”, even in the United States of America. The second link is to “Freedom of Speech - Liquid Tension Experiment”. Freedom of Speech is first, not entirely free. Second, it’s a song. The next few links actually seem to directly address defending those who have been incarcarated for expressing their views against the Chinese Government, including this. However, the links quickly devolve once again into lyrics to Ice-T’s “Freedom of Speech” and a far-left pundit’s trashing of the American presidency.

And speaking of the American presidency… what would we get for searching for “George Bush“? The first link is an appropriate one (yet lacking in description, due to a WhiteHouse.gov redirection), pointing to georgewbush.org. The second link is a single joke about how dumb Bush, Cheney and Colin Powell are. Admittingly, the first anti-Bush site on Google is only five links in. However, I’m starting to see a trend.

A search for the Dali Lama brings up, in order, a personal web site hosted on MSN Spaces and referencing a fake paining by Salvidor Dali called “Dali Llama” (the first correct spelling of ‘Lama’ doesn’t appear within the first 2/3rd’s of the page). The second most relevant result is relating the Dali Lama (one instance of the words “Dali Lama” on the page) to the Avalokitesvara. Information after that is not really wrong, but incomplete. There’s never a link in the first three pages that actually gives any detail on the Dali Lama. There is, however, a link to an online store selling “Dude! Where’s My Car?”.

The first link to “Tiananmen Square” describes a metaphor for the Chinese loss of identity as Colonial Saunders faces down Chairman Mao from a KFC nearby. Only the last link on the first page will take the viewer to a largly unintelligible whine and vague reference to the massacre in Tiananmen Square.

Links following a search for Japan were surprisingly civil. Both relevant and respectible. Perhaps the most accurate search from the short list of words I predicted would cause some stir.

What if I’m wrong and Baidu isn’t really screwing with the results? What if, instead of providing preferred results, it’s simply a really bad search engine, despite its popularity? Kind of the retarded cousin of search engines.

With that thought, I wanted to compare my choices of search terms with options the People’s Republic of China might prefer, like Mao Zedong (the current leader). The first link was to a list of quotes by the man. Then an accurate one-page essay, then a link to a book you can buy about him.

Following the Google method, a search for Communism returned a Wiki-style definition of the word. However, the surprising link on the page was one titled “Re: Communism is the great evil of this world“. Initially shocked, the link pointed to a page which posted an absurd graphic from a 1930’s pamphlet published during the USA/Russia Cold War. The interpretation intended, I would assume, to be how over-the-top Communist critics can be.

Up to this point, the first two links on any search tend to be targetted very specifically. From the third link on, there may be obvious, missing pages (like anything with detail about the Dali Lama), but they are largely of varied opinions. My best guess would be that, for chosen words, the first two links are chosen manually, and the rest are free searches… with certain, detailed sites withdrawn from the database.

Finally, the most interesting link I came across was for the predictably controvercial “Falun Gong“, or rather, the lack of links. There are none. A literal translation of the page doesn’t quite help me understand what the page is saying, so if you can let me know, please do. From what I can gleen, it’s saying that there are simply no results to return.