Google censoring searches in China again

Google has a new logo and updating its image – but under the surface it’s still that pre-2010 half-evil censor

Eight years after Google pulled out of the censored Chinese internet, they’re back.  It’s been reported that the company is working on a mobile search app that would block certain search terms and allow it to reenter the Chinese market.

Google has engaged in the China-controlled internet space before: but in 2010 it pulled out, citing censorship and hacking as reasons.  It didn’t pull out completely – it still offered a number of apps to Chinese users, including Google Translate and Files Go, and the company has offices in Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai – But the largest of its services – search, email, and the Play app store – are all unavailable in the country.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the Guardian in 2010 that his opposition to enabling censorship was motivated to his being born in Soviet Russia.   “It touches me more than other people having been born in a country that was totalitarian and having seen that for the first few years of my life,” he said as Google exited the Chinese market after 4 years of cooperating with the authorities.

But now they’re back, working on a mobile search app that would block certain search terms and black-listed material.  The app is being designed for Android devices.

According to tech-based news site The Information, Google is also working on a censored news-aggregation app too. The news app would take its lead from popular algorithmically-curated apps such as Bytedance’s Toutiao – released for the Western market as “TopBuzz” – that eschew human editors in favour of personalised, highly viral content.

Patrick Poon, China Researcher at Amnesty International, called Google’s return to censorship “a gross attack on freedom of information and internet freedom.”

In putting profits before human rights, he said, Google would be setting a chilling precedent and handing the Chinese government a victory.

This is important because many computer users will set a search site as their homepage and even find content by entering key-words into the url bar of their browser.  Because of Google’s ubiquity, it is frequently set as default search engine on browsers, meaning that millions of users will find that their experience of the internet is that delivered through the lens of Google.  If that lens is smudged or cracked by censorship, all these users’ internet experience is skewed.  So it is essential to highlight the fact that Google is not the neutral, trustworthy agent that many users think it to be.

GreatFire, an organisation that monitors internet censorship and enables circumvention of the “Great Firewall of China”, said the move “could be the final nail in the Chinese internet freedom coffin” and that “the ensuing crackdown on freedom of speech will be felt around the globe.”

How to search the internet 4: Understanding search engine results

This is the fourth part of my guide on how to search the internet. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here, and part 3 is here. Part 5, about using “advanced operators” is here.

So you’ve used Google or some other web search engine, following the tips I’ve given you in this little series, and you’ve been confronted with “results” that don’t actually seem to be any help whatsoever. And it’s true, often Google comes across as an incomprehensible joke designed to make you feel bad. But don’t fret: Google (and its kind) really don’t want you to run screaming; they want you to use the results to find what it is you’re looking for. Unfortunately, this may involve having to learn a thing or two about how Google works. It may be scary-looking at first glance, but really Google want you to find their results pages easily to comprehend. They want you to return to Google.com every time you want help in finding what you want. It can be a rather intimidating interface the first time you look at a results page: but it is all pretty simple really. You just need to know how to understanding the reams of info Google throws at you. Hopefully, this 4th part of my guide will make it all seem far easier.

First thing first: very often Google will offer you a list of sponsored results that may give you what you’re looking for; but if you click on a sponsored link you will be putting money in Mr Google’s pocket and chances are that link will be useless. Forget the sponsored links: go for the meat and potatoes in the list of real links.

Look at the search results; very often you will find other kinds of info alongside those results. Stuff like:

Suggested spelling corrections: Google may think you typed in your query incorrectly. If you’re no good at spelling, this can be a life-saver. But if you know damn well you typed your query correctly, forget this option;

Dictionary definitions: Are you actually searching for the word/s you mean to search for? Maybe you are, maybe you’re not. Think about it. Spelling can be a right tricky operation;

Cached pages: Google carries a huge number of pages that are not currently up to date. Maybe one of those cached pages may contain the info you need. Worth checking if regular searches are turning up sweet F-all;

Similar pages: Often Google won’t find a page that contains the precise info you want, but it has algorithms to turn up similar results. Have a look at them, you’ve nothing to lose really…;

News headlines: A webpage dealing with your query might be hard to find, but it’s often easier for Google to find news stories on related material. And these news stories may well include links to more relevant info. This can save you a bunch of time searching for that little nugget of info that will give you what you want. Remember: news stories are updated frequently, whereas a static page may never be more relevant. Use those options;

Product search: You want to know something about a particular project name. So search for that project name, add a bit of info on what the product can/is meant to do, and see what turns up. This approach works a lot more than you might think;

Translation: So what you want isn’t available in your mother tongue. But it may well be out there for speakers of other languages. Just think: if you are looking for info on a product released by a Portugese company, what makes you think that info will be in English? Search Portugese sites, using Google’s Translation feature or the other translators offered by search services. These translators are often pretty crap; but at least it’ll give you a good idea of what’s what;

Do book searches: Useful info may not yet be available in articles, but books often contain useful stuff. So it can often be a good idea to do a book search;

Cached pages: When a web page is undergoing a lot of changes, clicking on a Google link to a page might take you to the latest version of that page, which may be missing information that was presented some time before. Sometimes, these changes can happen frequently, so a Google link will not take you to the info that the search results first suggested.

Fortunately, Google will often cache an earlier version of the page. So, let’s say a particular page yesterday contained the info you want; but you go to today’s version of the page no longer holds that info. A problem? Not necessarily. Next to the Google link to the updated page will be a link to a [i]cached[/i] version of the page; basically, a version of the page that Google downloaded and cached before the important info was removed. So you click to navigate to the cached page, and you will find the info as it was before it got removed. Google’s system of caching certain pages helps ensure that the history of the web is respected to a certain extent.

If you want to download a version of a page that existed longer ago (several weeks, or months, maybe even years) you can go to [b]The Wayback Machine[/b] at archive.org. This is a project to archive internet sites the way they were in the past, so the current generation’s “now now now” attitude doesn’t drive the history of internet sites into oblivion. [b]The Wayback Machine[/b] doesn’t promise to archive the internet of the past forever; but it is a very useful project that has a multitude of potential uses. Archive.org, like most such projects, is run by volunteers and is always in need of financial support, as well as more practical support such as providing servers. I’d advise anyone who finds such projects very useful to contribute even just a few dollars.

There’s a lot of info on how to understand Google results, and how to configure the way Google works to it gives you the info you want and hopefully protects your privacy, here: http://www.googleguide.com/category/understanding-results/http://www.googleguide.com/category/understanding-results/. I really advise anyone who’s seriously into using Google as best they can to check out this info. Google really is one of the best resources available online… and it’s free! Let’s make the most of it while we can! Before the goddamn Man tries to take it away from us!

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How to search the internet 3: how to actually *use* a search engine

Okay, this is the 3rd part of my series on how to search the internet. Part 1 briefly covered the history of internet search; part 2 looked (again, very briefly) at how modern search engines like Google work; and now we come to the nitty-gritty: how we actually use a search engine to find the stuff we want. Part 4 will look at how to understand the results brought by the search engine.

The first method we’ll look at is the method most people think of using – the keyword search. This involves thinking about what it is you want to find, then choosing words that concisely describe the object of your search.

Imagine we want to find out about giraffes. We could type the word giraffe into Google (or whatever search site we’re using – I’m going to use Google as an example, but this should be relevant for other search engines too). So, we tell Google to search for giraffe: and Google turns up 8,550,000 possible results.

Now, that is an awful lot of web pages to trawl through to find whatever it is we want to know about giraffes. And a lot of them won’t be relevant at all. If you look at the result page for the search on giraffe you’ll see that the very first result is for Giraffe Restaurants – probably not what we want.

So we need to think about what we’re looking for. Let’s imagine we want to know about what giraffes eat. We could search for giraffe food – but then we run into that problem of sites for restaurants and other human food companies with the word “giraffe” in their names.

Giraffe feeding habits would be better – it garners us some 274,000 results – but also excludes pages where the word “habits” isn’t used, for instance where the phrase “feeding behaviour” is used instead. So what about using giraffe feeding? Google gives us 618,000 results for that, but maybe will include useful pages that we might otherwise miss.

And what about giraffe feed? That gives us a massive 1,300,000 results; but this more comprehensive search will give us “feeds” and “feeding”, and sentences like “how a mother giraffe feeds its young” and “what kind of feed for a giraffe in captivity”; and Google will also pick up on the word “fed”, which might be important. It all depends on what exactly we want to find.

But anyway, both 274,000 and 1,300,000 are a lot of results to trawl through. So some further refining of search terms may be order. What precisely do we want to know? Are we after info relating to giraffe feeding habits in captivity rather than in the wild? If so, we can search for giraffe feed captivity which gets us just 21,500 results! Yes, 21,500 links is still a lot to check, but it’s an awful lot better than the 2,160,000 pages we started with!

Sometimes users might want to use search terms in the form of a question – for example what should you feed a giraffe in captivity. This is generally considered to be a bad idea, because a question might contain words that wouldn’t actually appear in a web page you want to find. Google has a feature called stop words: this tells Google to not search specifically for certain commonly used words (like you, what, in… I’m sure you get the idea. But sometimes we might want Google to include stop words in its search. For instance, we might be searching for references to the movie “How The West Was Won”. To do this, we use quotation marks in the search terms; ie we tell Google to look for “how the west was won”. Then Google will look for pages that include the complete phrase.

Another poor use of search terms would be to tell the search engine to look for articles on feeding giraffes or documents about the care of giraffes in captivity. While those would be reasonable instructions to give to a human, they are not appropriate terms for a search engine. Remember, a search engine is a computer program, and computer programs are stupid. They’re good at doing exactly what we tell them to do; but the pages we’re looking for probably wouldn’t contain the words “articles on…” or “documents about…” so using those phrases will exclude many pages that we would actually want.

Another way to craft useful search terms is through the use of operators. Operators are query words that have a special meaning to search engines. You can find some excellent examples of operators and how to use them at Googleguide.com; but I’ve provided a few examples here so you can quickly get an idea of what this operator thing is all about:

If we wanted to find info about recycling steel or recycling iron, we would use the operator OR, like this: recycle steel OR iron. If we used the search terms recycle steel iron without that OR, the search engine would look for pages that included the words “steel” and “iron”; it wouldn’t bother showing us pages that included just one of the words without the other and we might miss very useful pages. Using the capitalization with OR helps the search engine to understand that it’s meant as an operator.

If we wanted to find pages that contained information about Steve Davies but which explicitly did not mention snooker, we could use the operator NOT or the – symbol, like this: “steve davies” NOT snooker or “steve davies” -snooker. (Notice too that we’ve put the name Steve Davies in quotes, so the search engine knows we are specifically looking for the name Steve Davies and not looking for pages that mention, for example, Steve Jones and David Davies.)

We can use the + symbol to help focus on a particular search term and possibly weed out others. For example, if we are looking for references to King Louis I of France in particular and not any other French kings, we can search for Louis +I France.

We can use the define: operator to learn the definition of a particular word. For example, to find out what the word “cantata” means, we can search for define:cantata. This will give us a selection of definitions of “cantata” from various online dictionaries.

If you aren’t too confident about the correct usage of operators, you can use the advanced search option with some/many/most search engines. For example, with Google you can click on Advanced search and you will be presented with a form that has a number of search term entry fields. This gives you a simple way of setting a number of parameters to your search. But if you’re confident with using operators, you can construct pretty complex search parameters using just the standard entry field.

When you are crafting terms for a particular search, it comes down to common sense at the end of the day. Just plugging in in one or two search terms might be enough for a simple search; but if things aren’t really simple, you need to give some thought to what exactly it is that you’re looking for. If you want to know about how to use the knight in chess, a search for knight +chess will be much more useful than just typing in the word knight or the question how does the knight move in chess. A little forethought can save you a lot of time, by giving you a much shorter list of results to trawl through.

Well, I think that’ll do for this part of my guide to using search engines. I realize I haven’t provided a comprehensive list of all the operators available, or all the search strategies you can use – but it would have been pretty futile for me to even attempt that. There are a number of search engines, and they’re not all the same. I advise you have a look at www.googleguide.com to pick up some tips on using Google (the most popular search engine on the web), and The Spider’s Apprentice for some more general advice. But believe me: while both of those sites are very interesting, they’re certainly not essential. This blog post, with a dollop of common sense on the side, should get you plenty of useful results to any search queries you might make.

This isn’t the end though – oh no, not by a long chalk. I’ve told you how to get results – now you need to know how to use them. Which is what I’ll cover in Part 4 of my guide to internet search.

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How to search the internet 2: how a modern web search works

In the first instalment of this guide on how to search the internet, I gave a little history of the search engine: I covered Archie, Gopher, and site directories like the Open Directory Project. Those are the old technologies, all pretty much obsolete now. That brings us to the present day and the modern search engine.

When I write “modern search engine”, I mean web search sites like Google and Bing. Because they all work in pretty much the same way – the only difference seems to be in the algorithms each service uses.

Now I could tell you all about spiders crawling the web and stuff, but I think most of you would just tune out after a couple of lines. So I will give you 2 lovely Youtube videos to watch instead:

The 3 Minute Guide to How Search Works:

A slightly longer video that looks at the subject from the perspective of a webmaster who wants to increase traffic to his site:

Watched them? Good. So now you have the basic idea: little programs called “bots”, “crawlers” or “spiders” are sent out to crawl over the world wide web, following links, and compiling lists of URLs that they consider to contain good information. And how do these mindless software automatons decide that the info is “good”? It all comes down to the algorithms.

It’s Google’s algorithms – the “secret ingredient” – that has made Google the world’s favourite search engine and kept them at the top for so many years. Any coder of sufficient proficiency can create bots to crawl the web; but it’s the secret algorithms that turn a regular bot into a googlebot. And there just hasn’t been another bot that can compete.

At least that’s how it has seemed for some time. Yahoo has a hard core of admirers; Altavista.com has had success mostly due to its “Babel Fish” translation service blowing its rivals out of the water; but it’s only recently that a true contender for the title of Number One Search Engine to step up and challenge Google. That challenger’s name: Bing.

Microsoft has been trying for years to break into the search engine market, with a plethora of products: Live Search, Windows Live Search, MSN Search – they even tried to buy, then made a deal with Yahoo to get that Microsoft name up there with the giants – but nothing was able to make much impact on Google. Then in 2008 Microsoft (following the tried and tested strategy of “embrace, extend, extinguish”) bought a tech company called Powerset and, importantly, its “semantic technology”. Microsoft claim that their improved technology cuts down on the risk of “search overload”, when a user is inundated with millions of barely relevant results – something that can happen when using Google. And Microsoft has used the near-ubiquity of its web browser, by incorporating Bing into Internet Explorer 8. Google is still number one search engine, but Microsoft has certainly made its mark on the territory.

So who’s going to win this battle of the search engines? I think it could still go either way. Google has years of good form and a hell of an online presence; but Microsoft still owns the desktop and the browser. And anyway, someone else might come from the left field and clinch it in the final seconds – Ixquick is a potential outside bet with their whole “ethical privacy” trip; Google’s got the “Don’t be evil” motto but it’s Ixquick who are out there actually being “not evil” (and if privacy is a major concern, don’t forget Scroogle). One thing we should have learnt from IT history is that nothing is set in stone.

I’ll bet you’re thinking “Oh well done Google and Microsoft, give yourselves a pat on the back… but what in hell has any of this got to do with how to use a goddamn search engine?!! I figured it would be useful to cover all this history and present situation stuff. Well, maybe interesting rather than useful… I certainly find this kinda crap fascinating. But you’re right, it doesn’t tell us a great deal about how to use a search engine. So I promise: the next instalment of this howto will actually cover some proper howto material. So keep ’em peeled… you definitely don’t want to miss this!!

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How to search the internet 1: the history of search

This is the first part of my guide to web search; the second part is here; part 3 is here. Part 4 is here.

The first search engine is widely considered to be Archie: a tool for indexing FTP archives which enabled users to locate resources. Its first implementation was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and J. Peter Deutsch, then students at McGill University in Montreal. It started off as basic lists of files that were accessed using the Unix command grep. Later, more efficient front- and back-ends were developed, and the system spread from a local tool, to a network-wide resource, to a popular service available from multiple sites around the Internet. The archie servers could be accessed in various ways: by use of a local client; by telnet; by email; and later through the World Wide Web. As the web became more widespread, its simpler interface made archie obselete, and now there are very few archie servers to be found on the internet. Wikipedia mentions an archie gateway still up in Poland; maybe that’s the last one?

Then there was Gopher – a protocol for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the Internet, dating from about 1991 and used throughout the 1990s. It was a predecessor of, then for a while an alternative to the World Wide Web. Wikipedia describes it as:

a TCP/IP Application layer protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the Internet, and was a predecessor, and later, an alternative to the World Wide Web. The protocol offers some features not natively supported by the Web and imposes a much stronger hierarchy on information stored on it. Its text menu interface is well-suited to computing environments that rely heavily on remote computer terminals, common in universities at the time of its creation in 1991 until 1993.

Gopher was called Gopher for 3 reasons:

1. Users instruct it to “go for” information;
2. It does so through a web of menu items allegedly analogous to gopher holes;
3. It was developed at the University of Minnesota, whose sports teams are the “Golden Gophers”.

Its user interface (text, based on menus) suited the computer environment of the 1990s – mostly command-line interface on remote terminals. But by the late 90s, as graphical interfaces to the internet became more common (thanks to web browsers like Mosaic, whose integration of text and images was much more user-friendly than Gopher’s text-menu approach) Gopher was in decline. Although it still exists on the internet, it is used mostly for nostalgic reasons.

As the web became ubiquitous, and huge numbers of websites were created, organisations began to collate lists of these sites into directories. Yahoo, Lycos and the Open Directory are examples. These directories listed sites in categories by content: for instance, if you were looking for a particular site about photography, you would look through Yahoo’s list of photographic sites.

But as the web grew ever bigger, it seemed to many people that directories became too unwieldy: if you’re looking for a site about a particular photographer and you’re confronted with a list of 50,000 sites, you’ll probably give up in despair. This is where the modern search engine comes in – the likes of Google and Bing. We’ll get into all that in the next instalment of this little guide to internet search.

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