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.
| Engine (uncensored) | Number of Keywords | Number of Results | Timestamp |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60 | 10 | 2007-11-28 10:17:27 | |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Keywords | Total Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|
| 56.6% | 34 | 60 | |
| MSN | 85.0% | 51 | 60 |
| Yahoo | 65.0% | 39 | 60 |
| Baidu | 93.3% | 56 | 60 |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Sites | Total Sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Censored by at least one engine | 36.9% | 143 | 387 |
| Censored by all engines | 6.71% | 26 | 387 |
| 16.5% | 64 | 387 | |
| MSN | 14.2% | 55 | 387 |
| Yahoo | 22.7% | 88 | 387 |
| Baidu | 30.2% | 117 | 387 |
| Google/MSN Overlap | 36.7% | 32 | 87* |
| Yahoo/Baidu Overlap | 65.3% | 81 | 124* |
| Google and MSN/Yahoo and Baidu Overlap | 29.8% | 26 | 87* |
| Google or MSN/Yahoo or Baidu Overlap | 47.5% | 68 | 143* |