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 | 2008-01-18 15:57:38 | |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Keywords | Total Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|
| 58.3% | 35 | 60 | |
| MSN | 83.3% | 50 | 60 |
| Yahoo | 65.0% | 39 | 60 |
| Baidu | 76.6% | 46 | 60 |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Sites | Total Sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Censored by at least one engine | 32.6% | 130 | 398 |
| Censored by all engines | 9.29% | 37 | 398 |
| 16.3% | 65 | 398 | |
| MSN | 17.0% | 68 | 398 |
| Yahoo | 20.3% | 81 | 398 |
| Baidu | 27.3% | 109 | 398 |
| Google/MSN Overlap | 49.4% | 44 | 89* |
| Yahoo/Baidu Overlap | 69.6% | 78 | 112* |
| Google and MSN/Yahoo and Baidu Overlap | 43.5% | 37 | 85* |
| Google or MSN/Yahoo or Baidu Overlap | 54.6% | 71 | 130* |