grelmar - 12:25 pm on Sep 26, 2004 (gmt 0)

I gather you know nothing about web proxies? Anyone in China with half a clue could get around this.

There are ways around any block, but 95% of the surfing population won't know how to do it. The average Chinese surfer isn't going to be leaps and bounds more intelligent than the average Western surfer.

So for 95% of the Chinese surfing population, blocked sites effectively won't exist. Serving up search results from them would be pointless.

And, as mentioned above, Google and other SEs screen results in all their listings, regardless of nation. Google and other SEs don't list info that IS accessible from the web from pages with noindex nofollow pages, which is a form of private censorship. Is that really any different, from an ethical point of view? Just because 1 private individual decides he doesn't want something listed in the index, is that a more ethically sound reason to keep something out of the public eye than when a government decides to limit access to certain information? Not to mention all the things that the engines simply miss.

For the forseeable future, there will be vast chunks of the web that are simply "off the radar" of the major SEs, most of it unintentionally, but some of it very intentionally. The web will always be tweaked for political reasons.

My favorite example: Within a few days of 9/11, "The Book of Destruction" was taken off freespeach.org (only to resurface elsewhere within a few weeks).

Western societies tend to have too much faith in free speach, they believe a myth that it exists in their own societies. It never has, and never will. Google "playing by the rules" in China is no different than google "playing by the rules" in the US, Canada, Europe, or anywhere else.

Oddly, the most "wide open" net tends to be in Russia right now. Go to securityfocus or some other security based watchdog site and do some heavy reading on exactly where all the top hacking sites and servers have been based out of for the past few years.