5 ms·

Inside Google's China misfortune

90 points by profitbaron 16y ago

obtino 16y ago
A great read!
mryall 16y ago
This article is just an excerpt from Steven Levy's book and it cuts out before it gets to Google's current situation in China. After these events, they redirected users from their Chinese domain name to their Hong Kong servers in order to sidestep the censorship requirements. This situation didn't last very long, however, and China threatened to withdraw Google's license for their Chinese website if they continued redirecting users automatically. When this happened in June last year, Google restored the censorship on google.cn, just leaving a link for customers to get to google.co.hk for unfiltered results. More details about this can be found on Google's blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/update-on-china.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/update-on-china.html
- gommm 16y ago
  They didn't restore the censorship on google.cn... Instead, right now google.cn is just a landing page linking to www.google.com.hk so it's just basically the same as a redirect, the user just needs to click on the link instead of being sent there automatically...
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - magicalist 16y ago
    yeah, that was a weird conclusion...it says right there in the linked blog post "instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page."
shareme 16y ago
I have a real dub question: If a China citizen has access to the Google filter results services and does not use it to filter unacceptable stuff and thus is punishable under China's censor laws does that not now satisfy the China Party elite as far as following China censor laws? In Google's view they could tell the Chinese government that they put the best person in charge of filtering results the Chinese user..
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  You do understand what "censorship" means, right? Hint: it's the direct opposite of "letting the user filter the results".
- mousa 16y ago
  Even if it were the case, you can't argue around China's policies with legalese. They have much more free reign to do what they want than other governments.
- anamax 16y ago
  Govt: "We want to stop {whatever} from happening." Noob: "Here's a cute hack to make {whatever} easy." Is Govt's response "Drats, foiled, I'll give up and go feed puppies." or "Send in the brute squad." There's an xkcd strip about defeating 1024 bit encryption with a $5 wrench.
dr_ 16y ago
I think facebook has learned something from this as they prepare to push into China. Looks like they are going to partner with Baidu on the initiative. Whether that's a good idea or not remains to be seen.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I don't know if this was meant to be a puff piece or not -- there's not a lot of sources outside Google. Hard to say if that was by design or not. In either case, the story increased my admiration that Google is trying to do the right thing -- sometimes being tremendously naive, but still trying to live their motto. That was good to see. The easy response to this is: you can't be just a little bit pregnant, that is, either you are a search gateway to the rest of the internet -- all of the internet -- or you are being controlled by other forces. It was sad to watch all the "free" companies in the west roll over when asked to censor. I'm glad this theme is getting more attention.
holdenc 16y ago
Bottom line -- if you don't pay your bribes in China, don't expect to do business there. For anyone who has every done business in China it is plain to see that all of this hassle is designed only to extort money.
- baguasquirrel 16y ago
  I'm kind of disturbed by the kind of cultural misunderstandings that are going on here. Bribes are one thing. Gifts are another. An iPod is cheap change. How much do you want to bet those officials didn't have one already? When I was a child, my mother would give gifts to everyone from my piano teacher to the doctor's receptionist. We would do well to be able to distinguish between bribes and gifts.
trevelyan 16y ago
I admire Google, but as a China-based technologist with years in Beijing it has been clear to everyone I know for a long time that Google China was an organizational and strategic disaster. Levy paints this as a political problem. But really it is an organizational one. The decision to hire Kai Fu Lee was a lurching move made impetuously from the top. And when they pulled out it was a lurching move made impetuously from the top. The biggest challenge for Google China was never improving Google's core algorithms and services (that stuff was sensibly walled off). It was justifying long-term involvement in China. But Google China didn't innovate. It didn't compete. And it failed to produce or champion a single project interesting or "non-evil" enough to persuade its disconnected Mountain View overlords that a public dust-up with the CCP might be a bad thing.
- vorg 16y ago
  Google's IME (input method editor) for Chinese characters was the first of its kind. It's been cloned by Chinese businesses, and it had its initial teething problems re the data problem, but I still use it when on the web from Windows.
  - trevelyan 16y ago
    Perfect example. The Google IME was nowhere near the first of its kind; it just became popular with non-native speakers because Google didn't cram in advertising like its Chinese predecessors and made it free. The algorithms involved are technically simple and the basic data structures are multigrams indexed as a binary tree or HMMs. The fact that developers had to steal data to do it instead of rolling their own corpus is a perfect example of the sort of chronic failure I'm talking about. Another is the fact they licensed Kingsoft materials (built off Linguistic Data Consortium data) instead of developing their own. Why outsource data development when you can hire people for under $2k per month to just do it for you? The English language media typically focuses on Google's genuine political problems because it wants to use the company as an indicator for the state of US-China relations. So people slam Baidu (an innovative company!) as a copycat and no-one remarks on the way Google's behavior suggests no serious effort or willingness to tackle the non-trivial or data-intensive problems that crop up in the semantic analysis of Chinese text. It is possible Google was doing really innovative stuff that I haven't heard about, but the fact that Mountain View made the decision to pull out of the country without even informing its China office is yet another data point suggesting the China office wasn't doing anything terribly worthwhile. Google shut house the way you'd fire an unproductive staff member. At a minimum, this lack of execution and/or attention to competing through innovation is embarrassing. Not for the main office which is focusing on language agnostic technologies. But it is bad for Google China and I would even go so far as to call it borderline incompetent. You can bet the parent company is heavily invested in semantic search in English, and Chinese is arguably a more important language for text analysis and retrieval in the 21st century.
VladRussian 16y ago
>After the employee's departure, Google chose a three-person government relations team, all female, led by Julie Zhu, an energetic woman in her thirties. am i the only one who thinks that such approach have no chances to work in China, Russia, India, etc,...?
- pnathan 16y ago
  Why do you say that? In the USA, we do not consider such a person to be lesser....
  - VladRussian 16y ago
    the point isn't about "lesser". It is about ability to communicate effectively and get things done with a government bureaucrat operating in the male chauvinistic environment. The phrases downstream in the article describe completely expected situation: >Zhu was better able to communicate with Mountain View. But she had her hands full fending off Chinese government directives. So they effectively improved interface to Google HQ instead of the interface to the government. That's very typical of western companies still learning how to operate outside of the Western culture.
- guard-of-terra 16y ago
  I doubt that you need a dedicated "government relations team" in countries other than China. As for ordinary public relations, in Russia they are executed by women more often than not. Editor-in-chief of Yandex, VP of marketing in Mail.ru, Director of PR of Google Russia are all women. I fail to understand why would you think this might be a problem.
  - VladRussian 16y ago
    >I doubt that you need a dedicated "government relations team" in countries other than China. yep. A bunch of engineers got together and certified all these MS products with Russian Federal government on pure technical merits. Have you checked the place of Russia on the world corruption list? http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/... The China actually is listed as "cleaner" than Russia corruption-wise. And politically - well, Russia doesn't censor Tiananmen square, so on this one specific point Russia may be scoring a bit better :) >As for ordinary public relations, in Russia they are executed by women more often than not. So, you don't see any difference between governmental and public relations in Russia? You aren't kidding, right?

90 points by profitbaron 16y ago

A great read!

This article is just an excerpt from Steven Levy's book and it cuts out before it gets to Google's current situation in China. After these events, they redirected users from their Chinese domain name to their Hong Kong servers in order to sidestep the censorship requirements. This situation didn't last very long, however, and China threatened to withdraw Google's license for their Chinese website if they continued redirecting users automatically. When this happened in June last year, Google restored the censorship on google.cn, just leaving a link for customers to get to google.co.hk for unfiltered results. More details about this can be found on Google's blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/update-on-china.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/update-on-china.html

gommm 16y ago
They didn't restore the censorship on google.cn... Instead, right now google.cn is just a landing page linking to www.google.com.hk so it's just basically the same as a redirect, the user just needs to click on the link instead of being sent there automatically...
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- magicalist 16y ago
  yeah, that was a weird conclusion...it says right there in the linked blog post "instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page."

shareme 16y ago

I have a real dub question: If a China citizen has access to the Google filter results services and does not use it to filter unacceptable stuff and thus is punishable under China's censor laws does that not now satisfy the China Party elite as far as following China censor laws? In Google's view they could tell the Chinese government that they put the best person in charge of filtering results the Chinese user..

michael_dorfman 16y ago
You do understand what "censorship" means, right? Hint: it's the direct opposite of "letting the user filter the results".
mousa 16y ago
Even if it were the case, you can't argue around China's policies with legalese. They have much more free reign to do what they want than other governments.
anamax 16y ago
Govt: "We want to stop {whatever} from happening." Noob: "Here's a cute hack to make {whatever} easy." Is Govt's response "Drats, foiled, I'll give up and go feed puppies." or "Send in the brute squad." There's an xkcd strip about defeating 1024 bit encryption with a $5 wrench.

dr_ 16y ago

I think facebook has learned something from this as they prepare to push into China. Looks like they are going to partner with Baidu on the initiative. Whether that's a good idea or not remains to be seen.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

I don't know if this was meant to be a puff piece or not -- there's not a lot of sources outside Google. Hard to say if that was by design or not. In either case, the story increased my admiration that Google is trying to do the right thing -- sometimes being tremendously naive, but still trying to live their motto. That was good to see. The easy response to this is: you can't be just a little bit pregnant, that is, either you are a search gateway to the rest of the internet -- all of the internet -- or you are being controlled by other forces. It was sad to watch all the "free" companies in the west roll over when asked to censor. I'm glad this theme is getting more attention.

holdenc 16y ago

Bottom line -- if you don't pay your bribes in China, don't expect to do business there. For anyone who has every done business in China it is plain to see that all of this hassle is designed only to extort money.

baguasquirrel 16y ago
I'm kind of disturbed by the kind of cultural misunderstandings that are going on here. Bribes are one thing. Gifts are another. An iPod is cheap change. How much do you want to bet those officials didn't have one already? When I was a child, my mother would give gifts to everyone from my piano teacher to the doctor's receptionist. We would do well to be able to distinguish between bribes and gifts.

trevelyan 16y ago

I admire Google, but as a China-based technologist with years in Beijing it has been clear to everyone I know for a long time that Google China was an organizational and strategic disaster. Levy paints this as a political problem. But really it is an organizational one. The decision to hire Kai Fu Lee was a lurching move made impetuously from the top. And when they pulled out it was a lurching move made impetuously from the top. The biggest challenge for Google China was never improving Google's core algorithms and services (that stuff was sensibly walled off). It was justifying long-term involvement in China. But Google China didn't innovate. It didn't compete. And it failed to produce or champion a single project interesting or "non-evil" enough to persuade its disconnected Mountain View overlords that a public dust-up with the CCP might be a bad thing.

vorg 16y ago
Google's IME (input method editor) for Chinese characters was the first of its kind. It's been cloned by Chinese businesses, and it had its initial teething problems re the data problem, but I still use it when on the web from Windows.
- trevelyan 16y ago
  Perfect example. The Google IME was nowhere near the first of its kind; it just became popular with non-native speakers because Google didn't cram in advertising like its Chinese predecessors and made it free. The algorithms involved are technically simple and the basic data structures are multigrams indexed as a binary tree or HMMs. The fact that developers had to steal data to do it instead of rolling their own corpus is a perfect example of the sort of chronic failure I'm talking about. Another is the fact they licensed Kingsoft materials (built off Linguistic Data Consortium data) instead of developing their own. Why outsource data development when you can hire people for under $2k per month to just do it for you? The English language media typically focuses on Google's genuine political problems because it wants to use the company as an indicator for the state of US-China relations. So people slam Baidu (an innovative company!) as a copycat and no-one remarks on the way Google's behavior suggests no serious effort or willingness to tackle the non-trivial or data-intensive problems that crop up in the semantic analysis of Chinese text. It is possible Google was doing really innovative stuff that I haven't heard about, but the fact that Mountain View made the decision to pull out of the country without even informing its China office is yet another data point suggesting the China office wasn't doing anything terribly worthwhile. Google shut house the way you'd fire an unproductive staff member. At a minimum, this lack of execution and/or attention to competing through innovation is embarrassing. Not for the main office which is focusing on language agnostic technologies. But it is bad for Google China and I would even go so far as to call it borderline incompetent. You can bet the parent company is heavily invested in semantic search in English, and Chinese is arguably a more important language for text analysis and retrieval in the 21st century.

VladRussian 16y ago

>After the employee's departure, Google chose a three-person government relations team, all female, led by Julie Zhu, an energetic woman in her thirties. am i the only one who thinks that such approach have no chances to work in China, Russia, India, etc,...?

pnathan 16y ago
Why do you say that? In the USA, we do not consider such a person to be lesser....
- VladRussian 16y ago
  the point isn't about "lesser". It is about ability to communicate effectively and get things done with a government bureaucrat operating in the male chauvinistic environment. The phrases downstream in the article describe completely expected situation: >Zhu was better able to communicate with Mountain View. But she had her hands full fending off Chinese government directives. So they effectively improved interface to Google HQ instead of the interface to the government. That's very typical of western companies still learning how to operate outside of the Western culture.
guard-of-terra 16y ago
I doubt that you need a dedicated "government relations team" in countries other than China. As for ordinary public relations, in Russia they are executed by women more often than not. Editor-in-chief of Yandex, VP of marketing in Mail.ru, Director of PR of Google Russia are all women. I fail to understand why would you think this might be a problem.
- VladRussian 16y ago
  >I doubt that you need a dedicated "government relations team" in countries other than China. yep. A bunch of engineers got together and certified all these MS products with Russian Federal government on pure technical merits. Have you checked the place of Russia on the world corruption list? http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/... The China actually is listed as "cleaner" than Russia corruption-wise. And politically - well, Russia doesn't censor Tiananmen square, so on this one specific point Russia may be scoring a bit better :) >As for ordinary public relations, in Russia they are executed by women more often than not. So, you don't see any difference between governmental and public relations in Russia? You aren't kidding, right?