19.583 Google

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 19, No. 583.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2006 07:05:30 +0000
         From: "Jochen L. Leidner" <jochen.leidner_at_ed.ac.uk>
         Subject: Re: 19.582 Google

Hi,

Google also censors French, German, ..., indices, as do all other
search engines, if only for legal reasons (as saying certain things
is a crime in Germany, for instance Holocaust denial). Have a look at:
          http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2360351.stm

>However (copied verbatim from the URL above), Google claims not to
>censor its results

It might still be on their pages, but their PR people have meanwhile
resorted to a more shaky argumentation, namely that providing the Chinese
people with no search at all would do more harm.

Even without empirical evidence, it is obvious that everbody has an
agenda, and uses all possible means available to them to achieve it.
That's why you shouldn't rely on one search engine, and, by the same
token, you shouldn't read only one newspaper.

Note that some try even to clean their historic record: in the recent
"Meehangate" or "Wikigate" scandal, it has been uncovered that
US goverment employees worked on systematically influencing the content
of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.org (with >1,000 politician bios
modified):
http://digg.com/technology/More_than_1000_wikipedia_alterations_by_US_Representative_Staffers

          Regards,
                  Jochen

-- 
Jochen L Leidner
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh     http://www.iccs.informatics.ed.ac.uk/~s0239229