With Google caving recently (and then slowly reversing itself) and agreeing to censor certain word-based search results with search queries that originate on China, is Google's methodology working? Judging from this blog post, I'd say the methods are working, albeit inconclusively. With this 10,000-word test, 9% of the search results from this word search test provided censored search results. That's 901 word searches out of 10,000 words tested.What does this all mean? Not sure -- words can be combined into so many different phrases and phonetic variations that censoring all these possibilities is probably impossible, even for a brainiac-powered company like Google. And, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently stating that Google "had done evil in China", perhaps Google is planning to not even make www.google.cn (the search leader's Chinese site) available in any longer.
What this means -- possibly -- for GOOG investors is that Google, by sticking to its guns and corporate philosophy, may be missing a lucrative piece of an incredibly-expanding market in China. Google has an very large office there staffed by quite a few people, but it's strategy in China is a little muddy at the moment. Is it going to or not going to provide search capability in China in the native Chinese languages (traditional and simplified)?
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