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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yahoo | 60 | 10 | 2008-02-15 07:19:20 |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Keywords | Total Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|
| 65.0% | 39 | 60 | |
| MSN | 98.3% | 59 | 60 |
| Yahoo | 93.3% | 56 | 60 |
| Baidu | 98.3% | 59 | 60 |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Sites | Total Sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Censored by at least one engine | 55.3% | 151 | 273 |
| Censored by all engines | 11.3% | 31 | 273 |
| 20.5% | 56 | 273 | |
| MSN | 20.5% | 56 | 273 |
| Yahoo | 41.3% | 113 | 273 |
| Baidu | 47.2% | 129 | 273 |
| Google/MSN Overlap | 49.3% | 37 | 75* |
| Yahoo/Baidu Overlap | 70.4% | 100 | 142* |
| Google and MSN/Yahoo and Baidu Overlap | 29.2% | 31 | 106* |
| Google or MSN/Yahoo or Baidu Overlap | 43.7% | 66 | 151* |