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 | 2008-02-09 11:58:23 | |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Keywords | Total Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|
| 55.0% | 33 | 60 | |
| MSN | 86.6% | 52 | 60 |
| Yahoo | 63.3% | 38 | 60 |
| Baidu | 76.6% | 46 | 60 |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Sites | Total Sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Censored by at least one engine | 32.5% | 126 | 387 |
| Censored by all engines | 7.75% | 30 | 387 |
| 14.7% | 57 | 387 | |
| MSN | 16.0% | 62 | 387 |
| Yahoo | 17.5% | 68 | 387 |
| Baidu | 24.8% | 96 | 387 |
| Google/MSN Overlap | 43.3% | 36 | 83* |
| Yahoo/Baidu Overlap | 62.3% | 63 | 101* |
| Google and MSN/Yahoo and Baidu Overlap | 43.4% | 30 | 69* |
| Google or MSN/Yahoo or Baidu Overlap | 46.0% | 58 | 126* |