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Google: No news in China todayPosted by Jeremy Goldkorn, August 22, 2008 4:16 PM
If you are in China right now, try doing a search on Google News for "China" (using the international site at Google.com, not Google.cn). Here's our result from Shanghai:  A little strange for a country where the Olympics are about to finish. The absence of China from news searches does not appear to be a Net Nanny phenomenon or at least it does not resemble the usual blocking and filtering. However, doing a search for "China" from outside of China returns normal results (see this screenshot, captured at the same time as the above). A search for Beijing is similarly content-free (most of the time - normal results get returned occasionally). Is the Net Nanny going crazy? Has Google itself been hacked? Is it a protest by the guy who has been tracking down deleted documents about the ages of Chinese gymnasts? Or has Google, like Danwei, realized that the news in China will only get interesting again after the Olympics are over? |
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Comments on Google: No news in China today
I did the same search from google.com and I got the same result from within B3ijing. I personally like to use news.b4idu-inc.com (replace 4 with "a") because redirects to the news articles works more often. The domain is actually a google mirror. If you do the same search from there, it doesn't exhibit the same filtering that is going on. Other google mirrors are also available.
Same thing happening in Shanghai, but if you wait a while and click "search" again on the results page, everything seems to be fine.
I just tried a "China" search --
With Explorer, I was routed to www.google.cn. Tried to use Anonymouse, but it was blocked. Using Mozilla, I got the following results for the Google search "China":
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Republic_of_China
www.chinatoday.com
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ch.html
www.china.org.cn
Whoops, just realized your post was about "Google News". You're right...a search on that site for "China" (I'm in Beijing) yielded absolutely nothing.
The last time I was in the mainland, the search for "china" on reuters didn't work either.
I think it's a way to slow you down from shifting through a lot of China-related content in one go. Who knows?
sichuanese net nanny must be slipping; news.google.com returns "Results 1 - 10 of about 109,606 for china. (1.60 seconds)"
I can echo bocaj: no apparent problems here in Chengdu, and the top stories include some controversial ones.
Works well in Beijing. "Results 1 - 10 of about 743,620 for china. (1.58 seconds)"
And if you search "China" in Chinese Simplified version of google news, there are "约有867,402项符合china的查询结果... （搜索用时0.49秒）" That means there are about 867,402 titles that are related with the keyword "China", it took the server 0.49 second to find them.) By the way, Beijing here.
not in my watch
seems fine
I actually had this problem last night in the USA; for about 10 minutes there was suddenly no news on China.
Both google news international or google news china work well in Beijing.
nothing wrong from here. not the conspiracy you were hoping for, i think.
ben: We weren't hoping for any sort of conspiracy - we encountered this phenomenon throughout the day yesterday and posted about it. The lack of results was strange on its own, and the fact that it didn't happen every time was even more mystifying. It'd be nice to have an explanation, but right now we have no way of knowing why it occurred, or if it was even intentional.
perhaps just google updating its servers. just like those "youtube search function will not work properly" messages. Google is not god, it's run on regular computer equipment too.
Google news is messed up sometimes. Not really China's fault. Sometimes I won't get any result when searching "China" in US. Sometimes all the top news stories are missing. Sometimes one page is working fine, then when flipped to the next, nothing shows up.
From San Francisco, USA, when I search for china in google news, I also got nothing return. This might be because of google search engine algorithm to prevent robot to spam their site. There might be too many query to search "china" in google news
ps: google cache is encounting worsing situation here in Wuhan in a mysterious desparate way...
it won't work. it won't.it's going to won't.
Hmmmm... Wuhan is the home of Chinese gold medal gymnast He Kexin. We certainly don't want Wuhan residents Googling "He Kexin" stories on the Internet.
By the way, did you see any IOC investigators visiting He Kexin's kindergarten to track down her classmates? Perhaps a class photo could be dug up showing her with a group of other kids who were born in 1994.
I tried it from shenzhen today, got normal results. Maybe google's servers were having problems...
Hi, I am from Minnesota, USA and am studying the case "Google in China." I am wondering if anything has changed today, November 2008, from when Google first entered China in 2006?
If nothing has changed, I am wondering what the personal feelings are of those who live in China. How do they feel about their Internet information be censored?