17. August 2010

Does Google Censor Tiananmen Square? How To Create an Internet Hoax � Aza on Design

I’m using a search query that looks like one thing but is, in fact, another. This particular search query uses unicode characters that look identical or similar to normal characters. In this case, I’ve replace one of the “a”s in Tiananmen with look-a-like character from the Cyrillic alphabet. Nobody uses such a tampered string when writing about Tiananmen Square so Google naturally doesn’t find any results. Hence, it looks like they are censoring. As long as you don’t delete the entire query and start again, modifying the query in place will continue returning results that appear “censored”.