CenSEARCHip

CenSEARCHip – A neat project at the Indiana School of Informatics compares Google US and CN for the same search.  From the about page:

When you click the "Web Search" button, each side of the display will first show you an estimate of how many English-language results the search engine has for that national version. Our system will then begin downloading the top few pages that are unique to that country’s results. As the pages are downloaded, you’ll see a set of words of varying size in each half of the display.

We get those words by breaking the pages up into individual terms, throwing out some common noise words ("and", "the", etc.), and tallying up the results. We then find the 50 words that have the highest relative frequency of use on each side and draw them in a font size proportional to their frequency. For example, if you see that the word violin is very large on the CN side of the display, that means that the pages unique to the CN search results use the word violin much more often than the pages unique to the United States search results.

You can also see image searches. Unfortunately it does not support inline URL searches so I can’t link to specific searches, but try Dalai Lama, Tiananmen, or Falun Gong (image results shown below).  The "SafeSearch" feature was disabled so you may find some disturbing images, such as seen below.

falun gong image search through google

But check out the results through Yahoo:

falun gong image search through yahoo

3 Comments

sacrod March 17, 2006 Reply

fascinating…

beej March 17, 2006 Reply

This site may be barred from the motherland just because I wrote this post.

sacrod March 17, 2006 Reply

that may be true. Maybe I should do something like that on my website. then I can prevent Chinese people from spying on me… hmmm…..

Talk to me, Goose.

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