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 | 2008-03-16 15:59:46 | |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Keywords | Total Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|
| 58.3% | 35 | 60 | |
| MSN | 86.6% | 52 | 60 |
| Yahoo | 66.6% | 40 | 60 |
| Baidu | 88.3% | 53 | 60 |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Sites | Total Sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Censored by at least one engine | 30.2% | 119 | 394 |
| Censored by all engines | 8.12% | 32 | 394 |
| 15.2% | 60 | 394 | |
| MSN | 15.2% | 60 | 394 |
| Yahoo | 20.8% | 82 | 394 |
| Baidu | 23.3% | 92 | 394 |
| Google/MSN Overlap | 41.1% | 35 | 85* |
| Yahoo/Baidu Overlap | 74.0% | 74 | 100* |
| Google and MSN/Yahoo and Baidu Overlap | 41.5% | 32 | 77* |
| Google or MSN/Yahoo or Baidu Overlap | 55.4% | 66 | 119* |