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Google wants a book deal. And no, not so it can spill all the secrets of the Internet, but so they can offer electronic versions of books. But their proposed settlement faced so much opposition that they had to drop it, although they’re still pursuing other avenues. Aside from Yahoo and Microsoft, authors also challenged the Google book deal—including Chinese authors.
But the Chinese authors’ complaints, when indexed by Google, were listed as potentially harmful in SERPs, The Inquirer reports. Baidu gave no malware warning in its SERPs for the page. After readers reported this, the newspaper of the Communist Party accused the search engine of keeping its users away from the information. Meanwhile, an unnamed paper official said the section with the complaint was “maliciously blocked by Google.”
Yep. That’s right. The Chinese government’s newspaper accused Google of censorship. Now, we all know that the Chinese government would never censor the Internet, so clearly, we can definitely believe everything they say. Riiiight.
The facts: Google is serving a malware warning for that page. But, Google claims, that warning is handled by an algorithm. No human hands, etc. And we’ve seen in the past that’s the way this works.
So what do you think? Is Google trying to keep its users from seeing the Chinese authors’ complaints? Or is it just their crappy luck that their software flagged the page and now it’s getting even more attention?
