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 | 2007-12-13 16:05:10 | |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Keywords | Total Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|
| 58.3% | 35 | 60 | |
| MSN | 88.3% | 53 | 60 |
| Yahoo | 68.3% | 41 | 60 |
| Baidu | 95.0% | 57 | 60 |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Sites | Total Sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Censored by at least one engine | 36.4% | 146 | 401 |
| Censored by all engines | 7.98% | 32 | 401 |
| 15.9% | 64 | 401 | |
| MSN | 17.7% | 71 | 401 |
| Yahoo | 21.1% | 85 | 401 |
| Baidu | 29.4% | 118 | 401 |
| Google/MSN Overlap | 40.6% | 39 | 96* |
| Yahoo/Baidu Overlap | 62.4% | 78 | 125* |
| Google and MSN/Yahoo and Baidu Overlap | 37.6% | 32 | 85* |
| Google or MSN/Yahoo or Baidu Overlap | 51.3% | 75 | 146* |