New Scientist (via SearchEngineLowdown): Google omits controversial news stories in China

The "do no evil" search engine company is apparently helping China filter out controversial content in its results, including material on democracy and religious movements. Google admits to omitting the pages with banned topics, but says it does so because the Chinese government makes those sites inaccessible, and it doesn't want to link to pages that seem to be broken. But Google frequently caches pages for this purpose in other countries, ensuring that readers can access the content, even if a server is down.

Dynamic Internet Technology, a U.S.-based firm that sells services allowing companies to get around Chinese filtering, said that its tests show Google's Chinese site blocks the pages and shows different content depending on where the query comes from.

Yahoo also was accused of abetting Chinese attacks on press freedoms in 2002, when it apparently deliberately limited results on Falun Gong pages.

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