March 23, 2023

Hacking Google China Censorship

If you haven’t yet read, Google is censoring search results in china. As a core example, compare the google Image results for tiananmen in Google.com and Google.cn

They’re drastically different. The reason is, Google has had to employ censorship on certain words. Free Tibet is another one.

Google engineers seemed to have over looked basic text encoding though, so instead of searching for proverbially tiananmen, I tried searching for it’s character code equivalent:

tiananmen

This is what I got.

Clearly not the results the chinese would prefer eh?

So for all you free thinking chinese, you probably have about a day worth of searching now before Google catches on.

Oh, and if you’re looking for an easy text encoder, try This One

awhile About Ryan Jones

Ryan Jones is an SEO from Detroit. By day he works as a manager of SEO & Analytics at SapientNitro where his team performs SEO for Fortune500 clients. By night he's either playing hockey or attempting to take over the world with his own websites - which he would have already succeeded in doing had it not been for those meddling kids and their dog. The views expressed here have not been paid for and belong only to Ryan, not any of his employers or clients. Follow Ryan on Twitter at: @RyanJones, add him on Google+ or visit his personal website: www.RyanMJones.com