Google Pushes Back Against Chinese Internet Censorship

Ever been throttled by the Net Nanny in China while doing a simple Google search? Your IP gets cut (or gagged? dick-vised? Sorry, I’m not familiar with Internet’s more technical terms) and you’re unable to use Google for up to a minute or more. This may not seem like a big deal, but when you’re in the middle of doing just one thing that requires the use of the Internet — like, say, you’re making a bar quiz, and you’re late, and you just need to find out how many sons the Swiss Robinson Crusoe family had because it’s Children’s Day and you need a child-themed question — and the Internet craps on your face cause China’s an asshole, forcing you to use Baidu or — merciful God forbid — Bing, and you can’t get on your VPN cause you’re in the goddamn office where VPN services are strangled in a dark back-room and its body raped by warty Gorgons who shout codswallop about the glory of headless chickens and ALL YOU WANT TO DO IS FIND OUT HOW MANY GODDAMN SONS THE SWISS ROBINSON CRUSOE FAMILY HAD, well, it’s times like these that one is liable to get irritated.

For those of you living in a place where the Internet is free and fast, where you can watch all the YouTube videos of Maru’s 5th birthday and Gotye parodies you want, you might be thinking: Who is this sourpuss who can’t relax and enjoy the good parts of being alive and swell like a flowery pistil open to a resplendent spring rain? To those of you: FUCK YOU. Go ram your head against a brick wall, you fucking assholes who have never experienced anger in your grass-grazing existence. Youku video for those of you in China after the jump, if it gets past the censors. Oh, I almost forgot — this post is about Google.

So starting today we’ll notify users in mainland China when they enter a keyword that may cause connection issues. By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China. Of course, if users want to press ahead with their original queries they can carry on.

In order to figure out which keywords are causing problems, a team of engineers in the U.S. reviewed the 350,000 most popular search queries in China. In their research, they looked at multiple signals to identify the disruptive queries, and from there they identified specific terms at the root of the issue.

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