Fred Stutzman points out that for the query site:ibiblio.org google.com estimates 7,640,000 hits while google.cn estimates 1,610,000, perhaps explained in part by ibliblio’s support of freedom in Tibet.
That’s an impressive ratio of 4.75 pages findable in the relatively free world to 1 page findable in China, call it a domain FCR of 4.75.
The domain FCR of a few sites I’m involved with:
bitzi.com: 635,000/210,000 = 3.02
creativecommons.org: 213,000/112,000 = 1.90
gondwanaland.com: 514/540 = 0.95
Five other sites of interest:
archive.org: 5,900,000/427,000 = 13.82
blogspot.com: 24,300,000/15,400,000 = 1.58
ibiblio.org: 5,260,000/ 1,270,000 = 4.14
typepad.com: 13,100,000 /2,850,000 = 4.60
wikipedia.org: 156,000,000/17,000,000 = 9.18
If you are cool your FCR will be very high. The third site above is my personal domain. I am obviously very uncool and so loved by the Communist Party of China that they have twisted Google’s arm to make more of my blog posts available in China than are available elsewhere.
The Internet Archive is obviously the coolest site by far amongst those surveyed above, followed by Wikipedia. Very curious that Google apparently blocks a far higher percentage of pages at the blog service TypePad than of those at Google property Blogspot.
It must be noted that the number of hits any web scale search engine claims are only estimates and these can vary considerably. Presumably Stutzman and I were hitting different Google servers, or perhaps his preferences are set slightly differently (I do have “safe search” off and accept results in any language — the obvious variables). However, the FCR from our results for site:ibiblio.org roughly agree.
Here’s a feeble attempt to draw the ire of PRC censors and increase my FCR:
Bryan Caplan’s Museum of Communism
Human Rights in China
Tiananmen Square Massacre
Government of Tibet in Exile
Tibet Online
民主進步黨 (Taiwan Democratic Progressive Party)
Note that I don’t really care about which jurisdiction or jurisdictions Taiwan, Tibet, the Spratly Islands or elsewhere fall under. One jurisdiction, n systems would be preferable to the current arrangement, if the former led to more freedom, which it plausibly could. I post some independence-oriented links simply because I know that questions of territorial control matter deeply to states and my goal here is to increase my FCR.
You should attempt to increase your FCR, too. No doubt you can find better links than I did. If enough people try, the Google.cn index will become less interesting, though by one global method of guestimation, it is already seriously lacking. Add claimed hits for queries for html and -html to get a total index size.
google.com: 4,290,000,000 + 6,010,000,000 = 10,300,000,000
google.cn: 2,370,000,000 + 3,540,000,000 = 5,910,000,000
So the global FCR is 10,300,000,000/5,910,000,000 = 1.74
Although my domain FCR is lame, my name FCR is not bad (query for linksvayer) — 98,200/21,500 = 4.57.
Give me ∞ or give me the death of censorship!
(I eagerly await evidence that my methodology and assumptions are completely wrong.)
Great post. Enlightening. Clear language; not full of arcane technical words as your other posts, destined to your fellow snubbish geeks.
Thanks.
[…] Apparently I’m cooler than Mike—more accurately my domain is: yergler.net’s FCR of 2.86 easily best’s gondwanaland.com’s measly 0.95. Personally, well, not as cool as Mike (more accurately the set containing all Yerglers is less cool than the set containing all Linksvayers): 2.66 for Yerglers, stomped by 4.57 for Linksvayers. […]
24,000 / 11,500. (What amazes me most, though, is the magnitude of my raw numbers: my home copy of my site has 4991 files, including logs; that doesn’t include my 1813 blog posts.)
[…] Mike Linksvayer My opinions only. I do not represent any organization in this publication. « What’s your Freedom/China Ratio? […]
[…] Much higher than Linksvayer’s However, he is working on fixing that in the most efficient manner possible. Posted by jon @ 04:48:49 2006.01.29 […]
Now we need a tool to automate ths comparison…
[…] Why “support” free speech when you can engage in it? There may be no other issue where direct action is so easy, so do it! […]
Sad to see how much people in China are loosing…
Just tried this out in Canton and got the same results as you for site:wikipedia.org – 156,000,000. The main difference of note is that the pages aren’t accessible here!
laurence, were you using google.com or .cn? I suspect you were using .com and that .cn doesn’t show many of the pages in results that aren’t accessible anyway.
Ah…sorry, Mike! I was using google.com.cn. But this is a point to bear in mind – Users can use any of these servers so are free to see as many estimated hits as they wish.
I suspect you’re right that .cn doesn’t show as many inaccessible hits, but in my experience wikipedia is completely blocked.
[…] An alternative, perhaps less sexy because it involves no technology adoption, is supply-side anti-censorship: make verboten information ubiquitous. Anyone upset about google.cn should publish information the Communist Party wants censored (my example is pathetic, need to work on that). This is of course not mutually exclusive with continuing to carp and dream of techno-liberation. […]
[…] Not the context I imagined, but Boing Boing is calling for supply side anti-censorship: What happens when the blogosphere uses so much tasteful nudity that the web is unusable for SmartFilter users? What happens when SmartFilter blocks so much content that the web is crippled for its users? […]
You said to give you ∞ (x/0)…don’t you mean 1 (x/x)?
Carl, I mean x/0, i.e., all of my are deemed worthy of filtering by google.cn’s masters.
[…] course Wikileaks is blocked in China, which gives them some cred in my opinion (but note the measurement described in that post doesn’t seem to work anymore — from […]