Comparing Images of "Tiananmen Square Protest" via Google China and Other Countries

(This article was originally posted in Japanese at 15:00 Nov. 27, 2009)i

Google announced lately that recent cyber attacks and clampdowns on freedom of speech on the web have led them to reconsider their business in China, declaring on their blog that they have decided they are "no longer willing to continue censoring" their results on Google.cn, and they "recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn".

So what kind of "inappropriate" search results were being filtered? Here are the image results of "Tiananmen Square Protests" and other usual suspects on Google.cn, Google.com, Google.co.jp and other Google subsidiaries. You can't get the impact of the so-called Great Firewall of China from outside China, but these results might give you a glimpse of what it's like out there.

Read on for details and pics.
Here's what happen when you search images of "tiananmen square protest". The screenshots are from a while ago (Nov. 2009). Click the links to see the current results.

U.K. (http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=tiananmen+square+protest)

France (http://images.google.fr/images?q=tiananmen+square+protest)

Germany (http://images.google.de/images?q=tiananmen+square+protest)

Japan (http://images.google.co.jp/images?q=tiananmen+square+protest)

Russia (http://images.google.ru/images?q=tiananmen+square+protest)

And China(http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen+square+protest). You can obviously see the difference.

Call us paranoids but we couldn't help checking "Nanking Massacre".

U.S. (http://images.google.com/images?q=nanking+massacre)

China (http://images.google.cn/images?q=nanking+massacre)

And Japan (http://images.google.com/images?q=nanking+massacre). We were relieved to see approximately the same results.

Here are the results on "Holocaust" by the way.

U.K. (http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=holocaust)

France (http://images.google.fr/images?q=holocaust)

Japan (http://images.google.co.jp/images?q=holocaust)

Italy (http://images.google.it/images?q=holocaust)

Germany (http://images.google.de/images?q=holocaust). Again, nearly identical results from former Allies and Axis countries.

As an after thought we also checked "Free Tibet"

U.S. (http://images.google.com/images?q=free+tibet)

Japan (http://images.google.co.jp/images?q=free+tibet)

China (http://images.google.cn/images?q=free+tibet)

We couldn't see much difference here aside from the order of the images. But the screenshot above is from November 27, 2009. So we checked the results again today (January 13, 2010), just in case.

And here's the images that came up. (http://images.google.cn/images?q=free+tibet)

Totally got the chills...