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0 pointsT-A6y ago0 comments

> China is already blocking these censored websites- linking them in search results isn't going to magically allow the website to load in the browser.

Unless the user clicks the little down arrow next to the URL, which opens the popup menu with "Cached".

And even if that were also censored, the titles, URLs and the first couple of lines of text returned by Google would speak volumes about what's going on. Imagine googling Tiananmen and getting page after page of search results which all turn out to be inaccessible. What would that tell you?

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bduerst6y ago

How many users browse the internet through Google's cache? Splitting hairs over cache vs. linking the dead website is ignoring the point.

T-AOP6y ago

> How many users browse the internet through Google's cache?

A more pertinent question is how many Chinese users would gladly browse the internet through Google's cache, if it were available to them.

A fair guess is a number at least as large as the number of Chinese users who used to browse the internet through VPNs before the government cracked down on those (nearly 1 in 3 of all Chinese internet users, according to [1], i.e. hundreds of millions).

> Splitting hairs over cache vs. linking the dead website is ignoring the point.

The point, which you appear to have missed, is that you can't expect the censorship to work as implied by the statement I responded to. Google wouldn't be allowed to simply serve up the same search results as outside China. It would have to remove them entirely.

[1] https://www.goldenfrog.com/blog/china-cracks-down-on-vpn-use...

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