Mark Meiss and Filippo Menczer, researchers from Indiana University School of Informatics, have developed an online tool that lets you compare the results returned by different country versions of major search engines.

At present, you can compare results from web search and image search from Google and Yahoo! in the United States, China, France, and Germany.

This selection is very interesting, because China is not the only country that requires search engines to censor search results. In France and Germany neo-Nazi hate sites are blocked.

How it works

The comparison tool is called CenSEARCHip.

This is how it works: You enter your search terms and select the countries you want to compare from pull-down menus. You then click one of thee search buttons, web search or image search, and your browser window will show a split display of the results for the two countries.

For example, if you’re comparing China and the United States, you’ll see information about the Chinese search on the left and the United States search on the right.

If you choose to compare web search, each side of the display will show you an estimate of how many English-language results the search engine has for that national version. The system will then analyze the top pages that are unique to that country’s results.

You are then presented with a set of words of varying size in each half of the display, not unlike the increasingly popular tag cluouds.

Interpreting the results

CenSEARCHip breaks the pages up into individual terms, excludes some stop words (”and”, “the”, etc.). It then finds the 50 words that have the highest relative frequency of use on each side. The words are then presented in a font size proportional to their frequency.

For example, if you search for “Tiananmen”, you get about 41,900 hits from Google.cn, compared to 4,640,000 hits from Google.com. The most common words from Google.cn are harmless, touristy words like “hotel”, “museum”, and “district”. On the other hand, some of the most common words from the top hits in Google.com are “democracy”, “free”, and “chen” (as in Chen Ziming, one of the organizers of the 1989 protests).

Don’t be evil

After some test searches, interpreting the results gets easier. The tag clouds provide a nice way of distilling and comparing huge amounts of information at a glance.

CenSEARCHip is a well designed tool and an important contribution to the Web in general and the debate over web censoring especially. By the click of a button it shows you what kind of information Chinese web surfers are deprived of. It demonstrates clearly how Google has submitted to the Chinese regime and how they are aiding the regime in their censorship efforts.