April 4, 2007

Google China's Unfiltered Related Searches

When it finds the most relevant sites to your query, Google also tries to filter adult sites, especially for general queries. There's a good reason for that: unless your query is explicit, you may not want to see adult sites in search results. Google also filters explicit words from Google Suggest or from related searches.

But not if you use Google China. Here are the related searches for girl at google.com:



If you search for girl at Google China and scroll down to the bottom you'll see different related searches:



Crack at google.com:



Suggestions for the query crack (Google China):



And here's something more language-independent:


So the question would be: why is it acceptable to show these queries in China and not at google.com?
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12 comments:

  1. AnonymousApril 4, 2007 at 5:23 PM

    I don't see a huge difference in the girl quarry. "Naked girl" isn't too far off from "girl gone wild" or "playgirl". Also these suggestions are probably based on the common searches based on the country. So, perhaps people using Google.cn more commonly search for porn?

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  2. AnonymousApril 4, 2007 at 5:47 PM

    It's a little ironic: An example of less censorship on Google's most censored site. Maybe they're not evil after all...

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  3. Dan tdaxpApril 4, 2007 at 8:09 PM

    Fascinating!

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  4. AnonymousApril 4, 2007 at 8:49 PM

    filter them or not, it is a problem!

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  5. Jus ad bellumApril 4, 2007 at 10:15 PM

    This is more of a language issue. If you were to enter the Chinese (女???) version of girl there would be different results I believe. Shouldn't searching for something via a different language result in different result as it reflects the search results in that language anyways? And is it possible that Google as a corp. allows the results to reflect cultural differences, in places such as Japan and the UK you can by topless mags/lad mags fairly easy, at the front of the rack.

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  6. AnonymousApril 5, 2007 at 3:48 AM

    This could be a deliberate attempt by google in response to the chinese demand of filtering results for chinese people.

    It seems that move by china to monitor all the internet has been dealt with by google in unexpected corners.

    but beware!! now chinese would like google to filter even these results...[;)]

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  7. Danny SullivanApril 5, 2007 at 4:07 AM

    As with Jus ad bellum, I think you are just seeing that related searches reflect the actual related searches that each search does in a particular country. So at Google.com, maybe fewer people search for "japanese girl" than at the China site, so you see this coming up as relevant there.

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  8. Philipp LenssenApril 5, 2007 at 4:12 AM

    "how to make crack", another very considerate choice for a related search... :)

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  9. Alex ChituApril 5, 2007 at 4:25 AM

    Regarding censorship, a related search for "censor" is "google censor".

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  10. AnonymousApril 5, 2007 at 5:24 AM

    China doesn't have the same puritan heritage as in the US. In the US, sexual thoughts are a major sin, but making crack is A.O.K.!

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  11. AnonymousApril 5, 2007 at 7:14 AM

    It's interesting that a new way to find cracked softwares has found.

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  12. AnonymousApril 6, 2007 at 11:15 AM

    I can think of two reasons that this could happen, either because chinese porn does not contain those words (and it is mainly chinese porn they are trying to filter out), or because the system they use elsewhere for safesearch has simply been modified to create the filtering that they do to chinese results. It would be a similar system, and they may have just changed the safesearch to do that.

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