Google being Evil
Sure, the consumer experience on their video store sucks. Sure, they've been keeping thngs in perma-beta status for no good reason. Sure, they need to figure out what sort of archival policy makes sense now that the general public knows that every single search's IP is recorded. Fine. I can handle all of that. What I distinctly can not abide by is the following shift in censoring policy.
"Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results. To learn more about Google's search technology, please visit ..." – Google's full help entry on "Principles - Does Google censor search results?"
cache'd page here. A current version of this page doesn't exist.
"Google is committed to providing easy access to as much information as possible. For Internet users in China, Google remains the only major search engine that does not censor any web pages." – The Google Team, September 2004 (in a reply on why Google News self-censors some sources).
Now Google is launching Google.cn which very distinctly filters search results.This is evil no matter how you slice it. Google, do not filter your search results, just let the great firewall run by the Chinese government censor the sites. It already blocks access to things like Free Tibet. How should search result policies for China be any different than a country like Quatar? Don't filter your search results and let the government-run agencies be responsible for the filtering/blocking.
The world is waiting for Google to do the right thing here. Don't let us down.
More detail can be found on this fairly decent piece of journalism from C|Net...yeah I know..."C|Net" and "good journalism" in the same sentence; Go figure.
Followup: A nice set of counter-points by Bill Thompson of the BBC. I still think that Google.cn is an abomination, and clearly this is far from a knee-jerk reaction. This is a fundamental change to the way Google does business in other countries. This appears to be only due to the the size of the potential Chinese market. Similar actions have not been taken with other, less economically promising countries. This is still very wrong and Google, if it continues to do this, needs to modify the "Integrity" section of their technology page.