Google in China

News and information is highly censored by the government in China and China being the most populous country in the world has a huge consumer market and most businesses clamoring to get a foot into the door will cooperate or toe the line with the govenment’s stringent regulations. Google as a search engine wanting to stay in China abided by the government’s specifications.

Apparently in China different information crops up when sensitive terms that are not looked upon favorably by the government are entered into the Chinese search engine when typed in Chinese characters versus when English characters are typed into an English search engine. In the Chinese search engine such information is blocked, censored or the site will redirect the user to something else instead of finding what the user is actually seeking. Sites like BBC, New York times are blocked.

Now, every “for profit” businesses main goal is to make money so Google agreed to self censor its search engine to remain in China and gain a market share by setting up a new search engine site called Google.cn. The main rival to Google is Baidu.com and todate has been the number one search engine. After the United States, China has the largest Internet market in the world and so Google has to dig deeper to gain a major foothold and it has done it by acquiring a stake in Tianya.cn which is a Chinese community search engine. Now both Google.cn or Tianya.cn will be pandering to the governments terms and restrictions, they will not add any value in terms of offering more currently unavailable information, accuracy of content or better quality of information. All this does is helps Google get more of the market share and add money into its coffers.