420 Summit

One search, two results

I was reminded by a commenter on a weblog post about Google removing .torrent links about their censorship of results in China. While this is old news and something I was vaguely aware of, I never gave it much thought — while undoubtedly important, my capacity for outrage was, and is, pretty much maxed out.

Still, as suggested, I did a simple search for “tiananmen square”.

First, I did it in the regular old (US) Google image search and got a slew of results (21,799) with the iconic student and tank photograph featured prominently.

Then I did a Google (China) search and while the student and tank image happened to be number one (I figure it’s an oversight) the overall results were far fewer (991) and quite different.

What confuses me is that if Google is yanking .torrent links, based on US law (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998), shouldn’t they apply US law to all search results? If citizens of Sweden are expected to abide by the DMCA, shouldn’t citizens of China benefit from our First Amendment protections?