Baidu Sorry for Pornography
by Taylor Flatt on January 6th, 2009 at 10:57 pm EDT - 432 views
Earlier this week, China announced that it was taking action against the main search websites including Google and Baidu. Baidu has apologized for the published pornography on their website. They have announced they are taking measures to prevent such things from happening in the future while attempting to rid themselves of it in the present.
However, Google has yet to release an official statement on the matter. But has been reporting saying they are attempting to clean up their act by removing obscene content from their site.
I believe that China has the right attitude in matter, although, I do believe it is wrong to remove such things. The whole theory behind engines such as Google and Baidu is for indexing websites where you can find relevant information on the topic you are searching for. I am not saying these things should be advertised openly, however, they should not be excluded from such searches with the attempt of finding such a site.
These sites shouldn’t back down because a country doesn’t like their content. What happens when they or any other country doesn’t like having pictures or information on hurricanes displayed because it kills many people every year? Although not very practical, it is however theoretically possible since these sites are backing down quite readily.
Source: AP
Image courtesy of noticastech
Category: Industry News, Online
Tags: baidu, censorship, China, Google, pornograpgy
There are 4 comments so far
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Nathaniel Ed - posted on January 6th, 2009 at 11:17 PM MST - Link
Yeah, but China has the greatest population, and they are one of the greatest users of computers. Since China is blocking all those sites, the blocked sites have SERIOUS damages since more than 1.3 billion people (Population: 1,330,044,544 (July 2008 est.) according to cia.gov, and the total population of the world (since November 2008, according to census.gov) is about 6.7 billion. That’s almost one fifth of the world! Assuming all of the countries visit Google equally proportional to size, the Google, plus the other websites would lose about 1/5 of the hits.
I really think that these companies should care about it. Maybe not NYTimes, since it’s suppose to be AMERICAN, but Google really should pay attention.
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Taylor Flatt - posted on January 6th, 2009 at 11:24 PM MST - Link
Yes, but by allowing themselves to be pushed by such a bigger country in a time of uncertainties can only lead to disaster. What if they want Google to censor out all United States Government websites because they had something on them China disagrees with. Would you still suggest they take them out because of hits?
What about if China decides that it doesn’t want sites displayed on Google if they have any pictures with violence in them. Frankly, I can go on but I think my point is put out there that if they get their way because they have the population what will they do next?
What if the US had simply stayed out of WWII completely because Germany had better supplies or because they had just taken France? What if all countries begin demanding things that are like this but demand different things be removed? Will Google simply ignore them because they don’t get enough hits from that country?
I don’t know. I am still pretty skeptical about this whole situation.
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Nathaniel Ed - posted on January 6th, 2009 at 11:27 PM MST - Link
True. But my point is that China is powerful, and websites could get screwed over by this if they’re not careful.
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Taylor Flatt - posted on January 6th, 2009 at 11:34 PM MST - Link
Then by giving in that is not giving them MORE power? I don’t want to go into conspiracy’s or politics but by giving in it isn’t helping the problem. For all we know, it could only be just slowing it down for the time being. I see no good end if things like this continue. The internet should not be regulated by any major entity no matter government or not.
