Anywho, you might like this article from News.com — which indicates that google.cn is even more restrictive than its competitors (Yahoo! and MSN) in the search results it produces.

The PC link is, BTW, a parody.

Gus

Sorry to be so long getting back on this …

No sweat Gus. I myself just got back home since my previous comment. I think the radio boxes under the google.cn search box may be the cause of the different results we keep getting. I’ll have to investigate further later and get back to you.

Sorry to be so long getting back on this, but my employer’s firewall blocks sites that translate web pages!

I haven’t the time to pursue this now, but it looks like I probably am doing something wrong. I get identical results again but for highlighting with “freedom”, but Curtis Weeks clearly got a different answer.

Gus

Might google.cn work better outside of China, then?

Hmm… you seem to be right on the results of the search for the “Ayn Rand” terms. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t find a link to ARI from google.cn last night. I don’t think any links to ARI would work from China however. Wikipedia is known to be a forbidden site in China, yet its article on Ayn Rand still appears in the results.

And why would Google go to the trouble of customizing their Chinese site, and admit to submission to censorship if there were no variations in the search results outputed by the two sites? And of course, if the results were truly the same, why did the Politburo firewall google.com before?

As to the “Tiananmen” search, the results for me still seem to be very different. I may be doing something wrong, though — so a link to your results would be very much appreciated.

I also have more unfunny humor you might want to check out: this is the English version of my search results for “Tiananmen”. Look for the crudely translated message right before the begining of the results as well as the one at the end of the page.

Have fun !