Google Search Results On Chinese Subjects
The following is a translation of a popular Chinese forum post.
(6park)
As everybody knows, Baidu is the search engine market leader in China ahead of Google.com/Google.cn. What happens if you search for "Baidu" at Google? What do they suggest? The first ranked item is "Baidu is trash." The second ranked item is "Baidu does not have" (which leads to the top result of "Baidu does not have a penis). Finally, in third place, you get Baidu itself.
China is known as Zhongguo (=Middle Kingdom). What happens if you search for "Zhong" (Middle) on Google? The first entry is "The Chinese Communist Party perish." The second ranked entry is China. The third entry is "The Chinese Communist Party."
You get the same suggestions if you search for the Pinyin form "Zhong."
If you enter "f" into Google, you do not get the "f"-word as the world calls it. Instead, you get "free tibet."
If you enter the number '1' on Google, the first three items are "1989 Tiananmen truth," "1989 Tiananmen Square incident" and "1989 Tiananmen documentary film."
If you enter the number '6' on Google.uk, the first two items are "64 truth" and "64 Tiananmen tank."
If you enter the number '8' on Google.uk, the first four items are "89 Tiananmen Square incident," "89 Tiananmen Square incident photographs," "89 Tiananmen student disturbance" and "89 disturbance."
If you enter "Hu" on Google.uk, the top three items are "Hu Jintao's son," "Hu Jintao graft" and "Hu Jintao's son graft." The other items have to do with wedding photos, train schedules, software and currency exchange rates.
If you enter "Wen" on Google.uk, the top three items are "Question," "the total number of deaths in the Wenchuan earthquake" and "corruption of Wen's family." The fourth item is "Wen Jiabao."
If you enter the world "Chinese" into Google, the first ranked entry is "Chinese people" followed by "Chinese people eat babies." Now this second entry is truly intriguing. This can be analyzed further.
The first analysis looks at the trending from 2004 to now. Basically, the term only began to really gain popularity in 2009.
The attention to "Chinese people eat babies" came almost exclusively from the United States.
The attention in the United States came only exclusively from the state of California. Google is located in Mountainview, California. You can draw your own inference.
Meanwhile this is what happens to a search on just Chinese." The United States does not even rank among the top 10 countries.This is the so-called fairness that Google holds proud. Can you see it? All this ranking by search engine algorithms is just fart air! Everything is manipulated by humans.
The First Opium War lasted from 1840 to 1842. The Second Opium War lasted from 1856 to 1860.
While we were still smoking opium unsuspectingly, the foreign ghouls brought their guns and cannons right to our front doors. Today, we are still enjoying everything that the Internet is offering, but the foreign ghouls are beginning to infiltrate our minds.
The Summer Palace was torched and our treasures are still being displayed in the various luxurious palaces of Europe.
This is not an issue of protecting Chinese products and boycotting foreign products. This is not an issue about search engines or YouTube. This is war. There is a conspiracy!
(Telegraph) Google denies censoring anti-Islam search suggestions. By Matthew Moore. January 11, 2010.
Typing "Christianity is" or "Buddhism is" into the search engine's home page generates a range of offensive suggestions for how the user might wish to complete their query.
These include "not a religion", "a cult", "fake" and "bull----". Few of the suggested searches are positive or neutral.
But attempting a similar search for Islam produces no suggested results whatsoever, indicating that Google may be affording a protection to Muslims that it does not extend to people of other faiths.
Google Suggest, which is generally considered a useful timesaver, generates its recommendations by analysing the phrases most frequently entered by other users, as well as the websites it indexes and adverts it has sold.
It aims to filter out "pornographic terms, dirty words, and hate and violence terms", and Google retains the power to censor particular suggestions if they receive complaints.
Google has denied protecting Islam from criticism, claiming that the lack of "Islam is" suggested searches is the result of a software problem that will soon be corrected.
¡§This is a bug and we¡¦re working to fix it as quickly as we can," a spokesman told Wired.com.
Entering other search terms relating to Islam appears to support Google's claim. "Islam must" generates the suggested searches "be destroyed", "die", "be stopped", "end" and "go".
(Urban Legends) Do They Eat Babies in China?
Dear Urban Legends:
I received an email last week which was quite disturbing and, to say the least, disgusting. It is about dead babies that can be bought from hospitals in Taiwan for $70 to meet the high demand for grilled and barbequed babies!
I am sure this must be a hoax, although the message comes with an attached slide show, showing how the baby is prepared, cooked and eaten.
Could you please investigate?
Dear Reader:
Given the nature of the "evidence" ¡X namely tabloid-style scaremongering and unsourced photos circulating on the Internet ¡X we must proceed under the assumption that the Chinese as a people, whether on the mainland or in Taiwan, are no more inclined to eat human babies than folks who live anywhere else in the world. The burden of proof lies with those who claim otherwise.
The same holds true for Gypsies, Jews, Christians, witches, aborigines, Satanists, or any of the other ethnic or religious groups alleged to practice this heinous custom down through the centuries. There is simply no proof that such a practice exists, or has ever existed, anywhere on earth.
The claim that eating babies or fetuses is a common and accepted practice in China (or Thailand, Japan, Korea, or Israel, etc.) is essentially a modern version of an ancient form of prejudice known as "blood libel" ¡X one group accusing another of murdering infants during the course of ritual sacrifices. According to the Greeks, the Jews did it; according to the Romans, the Christians did it; according to the Christians, it really was the Jews who did it; and so on since time immemorial.
Sociologists say the driving forces behind such bigotry are ignorance, xenophobia (fear of "the other"), and psychological projection (attributing perceived moral failings of one's own group to others). As an example of the latter, it has been speculated that the spread of horror stories in the West about the supposed use of unborn babies as food in Asia may be fueled by qualms about social practices closer to home ¡X practices such as abortion, for example, and the so-called "cannibalization" of fetal tissue for scientific research.
In any case, it is difficult to tell ¡X and under dispute ¡X whether photographs circulating online since December 2000 showing an Asian man apparently cooking and eating a human fetus are real or fake. We do know, thanks to documentation on Chinese-Art.com, that they were the work of a conceptual artist named Zhu Yu. The photos were exhibited at an underground art show after being rejected as "too controversial" by curators of the Shanghai 2000 Bienniale. For those who haven't seen them and aren't too squeamish to take a peek, here are two examples from Zhu's postmodern performance piece, aptly titled "Eating People," collected from forwarded emails:
The artist himself, whose past accomplishments include an opus called "Canned Human Brains," has claimed in interviews that he used real aborted fetuses stolen from a medical school to create the piece, and that he actually cooked and ate the fetuses "for art's sake."
Should we take him at his word? Not necessarily.
It is true ¡X to the point of being a cliché, in fact ¡X that avant-garde artists will say and do practically anything to shock their audiences, so we are obliged to acknowledge the possibility that Zhu Yu is telling the truth ¡X that he really did cook and eat human fetuses in front of a camera. On the other hand, "performance art" is often strictly that ¡X a performance ¡X and it has been argued that Zhu could have constructed his "fetuses" out of doll parts and animal carcasses, pretended to consume them in front of a camera, and issued tongue-in-cheek statements to the press claiming he ate human flesh.
That is a theory I'm inclined to agree with, frankly, because if Zhu's claims were factual he'd probably be serving jail time right now. There is no reason to suppose the government of China is any more tolerant of cannibalism than governments anywhere else, and the fact that Zhu's work was rejected from an official exhibition bears that out. By his own "admission," the fetuses Zhu allegedly cooked and ate were obtained illegally, thus if he is telling the truth he could be prosecuted as an accomplice in that crime, as well.
1. What is Google Suggest?
As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's "Did you mean?" feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. For example, if you type "bass," Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include "bass fishing" or "bass guitar." Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like "prog," Google Suggest might offer you refinements like "programming," "programming languages," "progesterone," or "progressive." You can choose one by scrolling up or down the list with the arrow keys or mouse.We currently offer Google Suggest through several Google services, and we plan to add more. To get real-time keyword suggestions when you type in Google News searches, for instance, simply click the "News" link on the Google Suggest homepage. You can also use Google Suggest by downloading the latest version of the Google Toolbar for either Internet Explorer or Firefox.
2. That's pretty cool. How does it do that?
Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers. An example of this type of popularity information can be found in the Google Zeitgeist. Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on your personal search history.
#2 means that if you run the same searches today, you may not get the same results as in the article on top.
