Google gets pragmatic and enters China

Googlescoped uncovers a new demonstration of lack of transparency at Google regarding their complicity in Chinese censorship:

[from Google Removes Its Help Entry on Censorship, More News]

Incredible. Google removed their help entry on censorship, as Gary Price discovered. Here’s what it used to read:

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 …

This is what the page reads now:

Document Not Found

Sorry, the document you requested is not available. You can visit the main page.

[…]

Google may now delete this help entry as well:

As you may know, Google is a reflection of the web. Although we aggregate and organize content published on the web, we don’t control the content itself.

It’s our policy not to police or censor content.

[…]

At this time, there is still no statement on this controversy on the official Google blog.

I had hoped the reason that there is no word (aside from the interview with Sergey, which I posted on here) from Google on this mess is that they are rethinking their stance and would reverse themselves, the true “no evil” path. Now it looks like they are just planning to weather the storm.