Goggle Google China Censorship
The story I did last Sunday on Google’s censoring of its Chinese search engine site has been linked in La Shawn Barber’s post titled Friday’s Blogospheric Conditions. My story on this subject called attention to the JunkYard Blog for falling into a MSM style slant by reporting partial truths. The JunkYard Blog seemed to just bypass the fact that the main Google search engine in China produces more results on religious terms like “Jesus Christ” and “Christian” than does the main Google.com search engine. The JunkYard Blog focused on the images.google.cn site which does show a bias against Christian related searches.
The JunkYard Blog never acknowledged my challenge of their story, but they did an update with a link found on the Instapundit pointing to Paul Boultin’s post on how misspelling of Tiananmen will generate very different results. What’s the correct spelling of that place in English anyway?
I have read how misspellings can be used to your advantage on eBay in Marsha Collier’s book eBay Business All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies . You can capture a fairly captive audience of potential buyer or none at all when you advertise a product with a misspelling. Some buyers might misspell or mistype in a search for a product on eBay that you are selling and you could be the only one selling it with that spelling. On the other hand, you might miss the majority of potential buyers by misspelling something. It’s worth researching before you create your eBay listing.
I have witnessed first-hand how a misspelling can generate search engine traffic to a blog. With my sloppy grammar and spelling I accidentally misspelled Goggle Earth as Goggle Earth in a post on The Tech Land of Ozz back in August 2005. I still get a large number of hits on searches for “Goggle Earth” and on images.google.com because the image name in that post was also misspelled as goggleearth.jpg. Now I will get a ton more search engine hits because I just misspelling Google a few more times.
February 5th, 2006 at 1:06 am
[...] Update: Google China Censorship and Google Business Decision [...]
February 10th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
[...] You and Michelle can read HERE, HERE, and HERE for more on this story. [...]
February 16th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
No Longer Googling
No longer googling.
From Google’s leftist leanings (98% of their contributions go to Democrats) to their support of Chinese censorship, I need a new search engine.
I’ve switched to A9.com. It’s owned by Amazon.com, you can earn …
May 10th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
This comment is a copy of the comment I left over at Chasing the Wind in response to the above comment.
I was doing a little Spring cleaning by going through old comments and trackbacks. I noticed that you linked to my site with “support of Chinese censorship”. That post was not in support of censorship. The purpose of my post was to show how misspellings cause very different search results and show how bias the JunkYardBlog was when reporting on this story. The JunkYardBlog pulled information out of the Google search engine that supported his story and disregarded some pretty impressive search results that show the Good News of Jesus Christ is getting into China via Google’s search engine.
Now to the root of your post. Let me make sure I get this right. You switched from Google to A9 because Google employees pumped in 98% of their $207,650 political giving into democratic campaigns. Right? Did you know that until recently A9 was powered by Google? Now A9 has switched to Microsoft’s search engine technology. According to the article you linked to in this post, Microsoft giving to democratic campaigns far outweighed Google’s giving to liberal campaigns. The article says, “Microsoft workers and its political action committee gave $3.1 million last year; 60% to Democrats.” If my math is correct, Microsoft employees gave about $1.8 million to Democrats which is almost nine time the dollar amount that Google employees gave (Approx. $202,000). So that means that if 53% of the $25 million from the industry went to democrats, then Microsoft employees were responsible for over 10% of the total democratic campaign support from this industry as a whole.
It did not take me long to realize that I was going to have to move to the mountains and live like Grizzle Adams if I were going to avoid spending my money with companies who either directly support or predominately employ supporters of things that are contrary to my beliefs. I was driving myself nuts trying to figure out who to boycott next. I would encourage you to do your best to avoid openly supporting those who fund anti-Christian movement, but don’t get to caught up in it. There’s plenty of work to do elsewhere winning souls for our Lord Jesus Christ.
I like your blog. I will return.
Thanks,
Hank O
PS: Here’s a URL for a story on the Amazon A9 switch to Microsoft if you are interested:
http://in.tech.yahoo.com/060502/137/63xf8.html