What Does Google Censor in China?

Everyone knows that Google has agreed to work with the Chinese government in order to censor search results on the Chinese version of the Google search engine. Many people have also seen some examples of this censorship at play, most prevalently with the example of Tiananmen Square. It sheds a whole other light on the subject when you take a look at the list that Phillip Lenssen has put together though. Phillip took the time to enter 10,000 "common" words from the English language and to log which ones returned censored results. Turns out that 901, or about 9% of the words that he searched were at least partially censored.

I copied just a tiny snippet of the 901 word list below...You can find the full list at Google Blogoscoped.

renewable, reopen, repay, replica, reportedly, repression, reproduce, resemblance, resemble, resign, resignation, resigned, resilience, resonant, respectable, respective, respects, retain, retard, return, reveal, revocation, revolutionary, rewritten, rhythmic, rick, rightly, rights, ring, rivalry, robbery, role, rosemary, roughly, routine, rubbing, ruins, runs, rupture, ruthless, satan, satisfying, sausage, save, say, scare, scared, scarf, schedule, scraps, screenplay, secluded, segment, segregation, sent, sentence, sentimental, separate, serious, sessions, setback, seventeen, seventeenth, seventy, sexy

Phillip goes on to note:

The resulting list of words is neither a complete list of censored search queries search queries resulting in censorship – which is pretty much endless, as words can be combined, and written in different languages – nor is the list in any relation to how common or uncommon a search is, in particular as it’s not a Chinese word list, and in particular as people don’t just enter single-word queries.