Google's "do no evil" catch-cry didn't last long after it expanded into China as the search giant gained official approval through feeble self-censorship. Worse, during the Tibetan riots Google.cn and the Chinese version of YouTube mysteriously went offline. Similarly, Yahoo left its blue-jeans, rebellious image behind in California when it launched in China, immediately kao-towing to the government.

Sure, lots of Western companies do lots of bad, obsequious stuff when trying to break into markets controlled by undemocratic governments. But Google and Yahoo are supposed to be different, personifying freedom of information. I'd expected more.

Futher reading on those scores:
YouTube, Google blocked in China amid Tibetan riots
Yahoo forced to apologise to Chinese dissidents
At least Yahoo seems to be making an attempt.

To see Google as Chinese people might see it, I thought I'd conduct an experiment.

First I went to Google translate, and using a tool still in beta, translated "riots in Tibet" into Chinese. Then I cut and pasted the resulting Chinese script into Google.cn. The first page in the result was, of course, in Chinese, but Google's translate tool also lets you translate whole pages if you paste in a URL (try it with a French or Spanish newspaper's home page URL, it's pretty amazing stuff). Google translate came back with:

Google - Message 2006年4月14日 上午 08:00:00 4/14/2006 08:00:00 am

天街小雨润如酥，草色遥看近却无。 Street light rain days Run as cakes, grass Yaokan almost no color. 今天就是这样一个日子，春意盎然，生机勃勃。 Today is such a day, spring and vitality.

在这个耕耘的季节，Google 取名”谷歌„。 In this hard season, Google name "Google." 以谷为歌，是播种与期待之歌，亦是收获与欢愉之歌。 To Valley songs, and is looking forward to sowing song, and joy harvest songs.

我们希望，”谷歌„ 能为每一个人整合全球信息，让人人能获取，使人人都受益。 We hope that the "Google" for each individual to integrate global information, people can access for everyone to benefit from.

欢迎你到”谷歌„ 来，让我们为你搜索，给你收获。 Welcome you to "Google" Let us search for you, give you harvest.

一条条信息就像一株株小草，鲜活而充满生命力，汇聚起来，成一片新绿，无边无际。 A piece of information like a Zhuzhu grass, fresh and full of vitality, clustering, as a new green, boundless.

我们把每个网站当成一个选民，所有搜索结果的排名完全由这些选民相互”投票„ 公正决定。 We each site as a voter, all of the top search results entirely by these voters mutual "voting" fair decision. 因为我们相信，信息面前，人人平等，只有真正在网络上被大家公选、信赖的信息才是有价值的。 Because we believe that information before everyone is equal, only real people on the network by the election, and trust information is valuable.

Well, let's see if the information is fair and trustworthy and valuable, as chosen by the people - which I think is a fair paraphrase of the above, minus the paragraphs of idiotic harvest metaphors.

Typing "riots in Tibet" into Google.cn (in English) delivered a toady clip as the top result (although more balanced coverage followed):

Google.com (either extremely slow or censored if you access it from China) managed not one but two toady results at the top:

... while Google.co.nz managed to sneak one popular, much-linked to and valid news story its top 3. Still, pretty lame:

Compare that to the same "riots in tibet" query run through Microsoft's search engine, Live.com, and Yahoo (and dibs to Microsoft for including a more critical result from Google's YouTube):

Both make Google's results look, well, pretty dubious at best.