OK. The name is not the sell feature of this cool search engine but it's got some really great tools and importantly, it's NOT GOOGLE.

We began hunting for a new search engine after Google announced that it would abiding by China's demands that it block certain "sensitive" items from its searches. Try typing in Dalai Lama, Taiwan independence, democracy, human rights or Falun Gong and you get either nothing, or government sponsored slander sites. Actually, we wanted to try typing in these terms but it seems that Google won't even let you get to google.cn (launched Jan 26) from outside of China to have a look see. Google says it's complying with local laws and making small sacrifices in the name of greater access to information. Of course, the other way you could say it is 'forsaking morals to pad the bottom line.'

Actually, the bottom line is that this sort of censorship provides a DRAMATICALLY skewed vision of the world for a typical Chinese internet user. This amounts to disseminating propaganda courtesy of the Chinese Communist regime. An excellent article on this topic is, Google Fools Itself and the Chinese People.


Some have asked, other companies (Yahoo!, Microsoft) are doing it, why single out Google? Many of us hoped for better things from them! The decision is rather ironic for a campany whose motto is "Don't be evil."

In our search for how to search we found clusty.com, which we really like. Others agree. One great benefit is that it does meta searches (searching other search engines). Of course this includes Google too but it's just one of many. It's best feature is that it also categorizes your search results into clusters (hence the name) so you can examine just one stream and not be bothered by stuff that's not relevant to you. If you have no idea what this means look at the screen shot below or just try it out yourself. It's also apparantly the best there is for seaching blogs. If you download the toolbar you can tell it right away what kinds of things to search (news, images, blogs, encyclopedia, shopping, etc.).


Yes, Yahoo! and others aren't much better and also censor at Beijing's behest. In Washington last week congress thought it was important enough to organise a briefing abuot how internet companies do business in China. Too bad Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Cisco all refused to show up. Speaks volumes!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 04, 2006 at 10:28 a.m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.