Are the Chinese Google and YouTube clones any good?

Posted By Joshua Keating Thursday, January 28, 2010 - 4:33 PM Share

With Google threatening to pull out of China, immitation versions of the search engine and its video subsidiary YouTube have emerged to take their places on the Chinese internet:

YouTubecn.com offers videos from the real YouTube, which is blocked in China. The Google imitation is called Goojje and includes a plea for the U.S.-based Web giant not to leave China, after it threatened this month to do so in a dispute over Web censorship and cyberattacks.

The search engine behind Goojje was likely designed before the Google-China kerfuffle began then renamed as a marketing gimmick, and indeed the results it returns are fairly different than Google's. (Goojje vs. Google searching for "Foreign Policy".). The site apparently complies with Chinese censorship guidelines, like the old chinese google. I tried searching for "Dalai Lama" and got his official website. "Rebiya Kadeer" worked also. When I typed in a Google-translated version of "Dalai Lama" in Chinese characters, the top result was an article titled, "The Road of Treason." When I typed in "Falun Gong," in English, I got an error message. The same thing happened on multiple computers.

YouTubeCn is more more freewheeling, with videos on the persecution of Falun Gong and Rebiya Kadeer available. While the layout is an almost exact rip-off of YouTube, the videos are really buggy with many requiring new versions of flash player and others not working at all.

Neither site seems like much of a substitute for the one it's based on in terms of functionality. I don't think Baidu should have much to worry about.

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ALPHAKILOTANGO

3:03 AM ET

January 29, 2010

Google.cn vs Google

Thank you for the interesting comparison,
A search of “Dalai Lama” using Chinese Characters (???? http://translate.google.com/#) yielded very different results in US versus Chinese Google sites (see below number of hits and the first translated phrases from the first hit). So, as of 1/29/10 2:56 AM US Eastern Time, despite all the rhetoric, Chinese censors need not to worry about Google.

US site:
http://www.google.com/
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,270,000 for ????. (0.11 seconds)

http://cn.reuters.com/article/CNTopGenNews/idCNCHINA-1605920100127?mlt_click=Tertiary+Navigation+CN_38_Static+module+_sec1-priCon-m0_News
Reuters, Beijing, January 26 - (Reporter Lucy Hornby / Ralph Jennings) --- Dalai Lama's representatives arrived in Beijing Tuesday in preparation for the talks with the Beijing government. A week ago, China's fifth meeting on Tibet work conference stressed the need to speed up Tibet's development, to achieve better social services

China site:
http://www.google.cn/webhp
Search for the Dalai Lama receive about 54,900 of the results, the following is the first of 1-10. (With time 0.09 seconds)

http://space.tv.cctv.com/podcast/xizanglama
XIV Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso how a farmer's son become the Qinghai Tibetan feudal serfdom under theocracy's leaders? He was from 1954 to 1956 to maintain a close cooperative relations with the Central Government after, but also how embark on the road of splitting the motherland

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