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 | 2008-04-06 10:44:06 | |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Keywords | Total Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|
| 53.3% | 32 | 60 | |
| MSN | 85.0% | 51 | 60 |
| Yahoo | 61.6% | 37 | 60 |
| Baidu | 68.3% | 41 | 60 |
| Engine | Censored % | Censored Sites | Total Sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Censored by at least one engine | 32.3% | 127 | 392 |
| Censored by all engines | 9.43% | 37 | 392 |
| 14.2% | 56 | 392 | |
| MSN | 16.8% | 66 | 392 |
| Yahoo | 22.1% | 87 | 392 |
| Baidu | 26.0% | 102 | 392 |
| Google/MSN Overlap | 46.9% | 39 | 83* |
| Yahoo/Baidu Overlap | 76.6% | 82 | 107* |
| Google and MSN/Yahoo and Baidu Overlap | 44.0% | 37 | 84* |
| Google or MSN/Yahoo or Baidu Overlap | 49.6% | 63 | 127* |