Archive for the 'Search Engines' Category

• 4.6.08 U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks ‘Abortion’ posted in Internet Censorship, Search Engines

  Wired reports that a health services search engine funded by the US Government blocks searches for the word “abortion” because of the possibilty that funding could be denied for project that “actively promote abortion”:
  Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It’s funded by the [...]

• 2.21.08 Democracy “Magnified” posted in Internet Censorship, Search Engines, Search Monitor

  The “magnify” component of the Search Monitor project attempts to match the top ten results from Google/Yahoo with the top ten results form the China-specific versions of Google/Yahoo in order to note the similarities and differences in terms of censored, returned (the website is in the top ten of the both the .com and .cn [...]

• 2.12.08 A Search for Human Rights posted in Internet Censorship, Search Engines, Search Monitor

  The Search Monitor Project: China focuses on assessing the level of transparency with regard to the self-censorship practices of search engine companies as well as the mechanisms and effects of this political censorship. (For background information, see this and this.) The following is a step by step process of a search for “human rights” (人权). [...]

• 2.8.08 Search Monitor Project: China posted in Internet Censorship, Search Engines, Search Monitor

  Search engines are increasingly censoring their results, often by geographic location, having a significant, negative impact on the right to freedom of expression. The most advanced cases of censoring political content is in search engines that market a version of their product in China. This project aims to expose and monitor the censoring practises of [...]

• 1.25.08 Degrading Transparency: Comparing Google, Yahoo and Microsoft posted in Internet Censorship, Search Engines, Search Monitor

  Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all maintain versions of their search engines for the Chinese market that censor political content. One of the key issues that emerged concerned transparency. In 2006, all three search engines, following Google’s lead, introduced a message that informed user when the results of their searches were censored. The presence of a [...]