I was having a discussion of China and Censorship of the Interwebs, and since I’ve never actually tried to see what sort of search results one would get from, say, Google’s search in China versus the US search, I thought I’d give it a try. It’s actually pretty different for anything related to criticism of China or Chinese politics and events. This is probably the biggest example:
The US version:
http://www.google.com/search?q=tiananmen+square
The Chinese version:
http://www.google.cn/search?q=tiananmen+square
Sure, there’s a language bias, since the pages on the Chinese site are assuming you want some form of Chinese as your default language, but I don’t think that explains away the huge difference in results. If you set the preferred results language on the US site to Chinese (Traditional) and Chinese (Simplified) the content of the results is still in line with the English results.