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 | 2008-03-19 10:07:06 | |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Keywords | Total Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|
| 56.6% | 34 | 60 | |
| MSN | 85.0% | 51 | 60 |
| Yahoo | 66.6% | 40 | 60 |
| Baidu | 90.0% | 54 | 60 |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Sites | Total Sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Censored by at least one engine | 30.7% | 121 | 393 |
| Censored by all engines | 7.88% | 31 | 393 |
| 14.7% | 58 | 393 | |
| MSN | 14.5% | 57 | 393 |
| Yahoo | 21.3% | 84 | 393 |
| Baidu | 24.1% | 95 | 393 |
| Google/MSN Overlap | 43.7% | 35 | 80* |
| Yahoo/Baidu Overlap | 70.4% | 74 | 105* |
| Google and MSN/Yahoo and Baidu Overlap | 39.7% | 31 | 78* |
| Google or MSN/Yahoo or Baidu Overlap | 52.8% | 64 | 121* |