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Google to show China what it's missing
Google could be set for another tense showdown with the Chinese government after changing its search experience for users in the Peoples Republic in a way that will explicitly notify them when their searches are being blocked by the authorities.
Senior vice president of knowledge, Alan Eustace, announced the changes in a blog post and managed to do so without mentioning the c-word, censorship, once.
The Google line is that searches made from mainland China and routed through its servers in Hong Kong can be inconsistent and unreliable, with users often presented with error message such as This webpage is not available or The connection was reset.
Google wanted to improve the search experience so it got its engineers to study some of the keywords causing problems reviewing 350,000 of the most popular search queries in China in the process, Eustace explained.
Weve taken a long, hard look at our systems and have not found any problems. However, after digging into user reports, weve noticed that these interruptions are closely correlated with searches for a particular subset of queries, he added.
So starting today well notify users in mainland China when they enter a keyword that may cause connection issues. By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China. Of course, if users want to press ahead with their original queries they can carry on.
The key problem for Chinese users is that the Great Firewall is a rather blunt instrument which can end up blocking innocent queries because they share the same Chinese characters as banned terms.
Googles Eustace uses the example of Yangtze River, which can be blocked for users, diplomatically omitting to mention why it causes problems.
What he fails to mention is that the word for river is the same as that of the surname of former Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, whose name has been frequently banned from searches since false rumours of his death spread online last year.
The new search feature will alert users as they type in the offending characters and present them with the following message:
We've observed that searching for [insert search term here] in mainland China may temporarily break your connection to Google. This interruption is outside of Google's control.
Users can then learn more about the interruption via a link taking them to a help centre article, continue with their original query, which will be blocked, or edit their search term to use the pinyin system - used to transliterate Chinese characters into Latin script to avoid unnecessary blocks.
Google of course famously pulled its search servers from China in early 2010 after a falling out with the government over cyber attacks and censorship, although searches from within the country to its Hong Kong servers are still censored as they have to travel through the Great Firewall.
Since then its market share has dropped to around 15 per cent in China, so perhaps the web giant feels now it has nothing to lose in improving the search experience in this manner for users.
However, the new feature is unlikely to sway the market in its favour. An overwhelming majority of China's internet users have plumped for home-grown search firm Baidu which self-censors and as such can offer a much smoother user experience.
In fact, Google will have to keep a constant eye on the ever-changing censorship landscape to ensure its new feature remains relevant, according to Hacene Taibi, CEO at Bejing-based SEO firm THEM, who told The Reg that "the pinyin option won't be used by 95 per cent of Chinese" as they are used to using hanzi, Chinese characters.
Although most of Googles services are blocked in the Peoples Republic its Android platform is in a market leading position there, so the firm wants to be careful about how far it pushes the patience of the Communist Party just a few days before the bloody anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989. ®
Google to show China what it's missing ? The Register
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Better search in mainland China
Over the past couple years, weve had a lot of feedback that Google Search from mainland China can be inconsistent and unreliable. It depends on the search query and browser, but users are regularly getting error messages like This webpage is not available or The connection was reset. And when that happens, people typically cannot use Google again for a minute or more. This video shows whats happening:
Weve taken a long, hard look at our systems and have not found any problems. However, after digging into user reports, weve noticed that these interruptions are closely correlated with searches for a particular subset of queries.
So starting today well notify users in mainland China when they enter a keyword that may cause connection issues. By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China. Of course, if users want to press ahead with their original queries they can carry on.
In order to figure out which keywords are causing problems, a team of engineers in the U.S. reviewed the 350,000 most popular search queries in China. In their research, they looked at multiple signals to identify the disruptive queries, and from there they identified specific terms at the root of the issue.
Weve observed that many of the terms triggering error messages are simple everyday Chinese characters, which can have different meanings in different contexts. For example a search for the single character [江] (Jiāng, a common surname that also means river) causes a problem on its own, but 江 is also part of other common searches like [丽江] (Lijiang, the name of a city in Yunnan Province), [锦江之星] (the Jinjiang Star hotel chain), and [江苏移动] (Jiangsu Mobile, a mobile phone service). Likewise, searching for [周] (Zhōu, another common surname that also means week) triggers an error message, so including this character in other searcheslike [周杰伦] (Jay Chou, the Taiwanese pop star), [周星驰] (Stephen Chow, a popular comedian from Hong Kong), or any publication that includes the word weekwould also be problematic.
Now, when a user types in a common term like [长江] (Yangtze River) from China, Google highlights the problem term [江] as they type, and when they press enter a drop-down menu appears beneath the search box:
Notices will appear matching the users language settings.
To learn more, users can click on the interruption link, which takes them to this help center article. They can continue with their original query (which will likely lead to an error message), or click Edit search terms, which will remove the highlighted characters and prompt users to try other search terms:
In order to avoid connection problems, users can refine their searches without the problem keywords. For example, instead of searching for [长江], they could search for [changjiang]which also means Yangtze River, but is written using pinyin, the system used to transliterate Chinese characters into Latin script. This wont cause a timeout, but will still generate search results related to the Yangtze River.
Weve said before that we want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services. Our hope is that these written notifications will help improve the search experience in mainland China. If youre outside China and are curious to see what the notifications look like, you can visit this link to try it out.
Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Knowledge
Note: To read this blog post in Chinese, see this PDF.
Better search in mainland China - Inside Search
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Where did you get such a ridiculous idea from, or is it just another stereotype?
