The imposition of government mandates upon Internet search engine operation
is a growing area of interest for both computer science and public policy.
Users of these search engines often observe evidence of censorship, but the
government policies that impose this censorship are not generally public. To
better understand these policies, we conducted a set of experiments on major
search engines employed by Internet users in China, issuing queries against a
variety of different words: some neutral, some with names of important people,
some political, and some pornographic. We conducted these queries, in Chinese,
against Baidu, Google (including google.cn, before it was terminated), Yahoo!,
and Bing. We found remarkably aggressive filtering of pornographic terms, in
some cases causing non-pornographic terms which use common characters to also
be filtered. We also found that names of prominent activists and organizers as
well as top political and military leaders, were also filtered in whole or in
part. In some cases, we found search terms which we believe to be
"blacklisted". In these cases, the only results that appeared, for any of them,
came from a short "whitelist" of sites owned or controlled directly by the
Chinese government. By repeating observations over a long observation period,
we also found that the keyword blocking policies of the Great Firewall of China
vary over time. While our results don't offer any fundamental insight into how
to defeat or work around Chinese internet censorship, they are still helpful to
understand the structure of how censorship duties are shared between the Great
Firewall and Chinese search engines.