Google China

Much media hay was made of Google's recent decision to launch google.cn, a Chinese version of their search engine that censors (or, in Google's terminology, "filters") search results. Today Google posted a detailed article outlining their reasoning for bowing to Chinese censorship. Of note is a part of the story that isn't being reported heavily:

... Chinese regulations will require us to remove some sensitive information from our search results. When we do so, we'll disclose this to users, just as we already do in those rare instances where we alter results in order to comply with local laws in France, Germany and the U.S.

As an example, the search results for "tiananmen" are drastically different in the Chinese and English versions, but there appears to be text at the bottom of the Chinese page that indicates the search has been censored (babelfish translates the text as "According to the local law laws and regulations and the policy, the part searches the result not to demonstrate. You are not must look: Tiananmen").

It'll be interesting to hear what Semantic Compositions has to say on the topic, as he's previously talked about Google's censorship of US search results.