China, Google News and source inclusion
Google Blog — “For Internet users in China, we had to consider the fact that some sources are entirely blocked. Leaving aside the politics, that presents us with a serious user experience problem. Google News does not show news stories, but rather links to news stories. So links to stories published by blocked news sources would not work for users inside the PRC — if they clicked on a headline from a blocked source, they would get an error page. It is possible that there would be some small user value to just seeing the headlines. However, simply showing these headlines would likely result in Google News being blocked altogether in China.”
(Emphasis mine.)
October 1st, 2004 at 11:02 pm
Interestingly when you visit China and stay at a hotel you have access to all the channels including BBC, CNN etc. In other words, I have never felt deprived of information in China and this is also true of internet where I have been able to access my Australian newspapers. I wonder if people really feel they dont have true access to news from the outside when people email, talk with and collaborate freely with people outside of China. In fact, I am doing this almost on a daily basis with our friends in China via both email and MSN messenger. Interesting stuff.