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 practices of search engines with a specific focus on China.
In order to avoid interference from the China's filtering system, the China-specific versions of Google and MSN, which are hosted outside of China, are queried from outside of China and the China-specific versions of Yahoo and Baidu, hosted inside China, are queried from inside China.
| Run Number | Engine (uncensored) | Number of Keywords | Number of Results | Timestamp |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Run 1 | 60 | 10 | 2007-11-28 10:17:27 | |
| Run 2 | 60 | 10 | 2007-12-13 16:05:10 | |
| Run 3 | 60 | 10 | 2008-01-18 15:57:38 | |
| Run 4 | 60 | 10 | 2008-02-09 11:58:23 | |
| Run 5 | Yahoo | 60 | 10 | 2008-02-15 07:19:20 |
| Run 6 | 60 | 10 | 2008-03-16 15:59:46 | |
| Run 7 | 60 | 10 | 2008-03-19 10:07:06 | |
| Run 8 | 60 | 10 | 2008-04-06 10:44:06 |