Google is taking a new, hard-line approach to China, which includes a new policy where they are no longer going to censor search results on Google.cn.
UPDATE: Laszlo Thoth checked and image searches for “Tiananmen” are now showing up again on Google.cn. For instance the iconic image of a man standing in front of a row of tanks can be found on the second page of results.
Looks like they images are now censored — no sign of tanks in the streets like in every other Tiananmen search, i.e.: http://images.google.com/images?hl=zh-CN&q=Ti...
Um, that's exactly the image I used for this post. Did you only look at the first page of results? There are many images of tanks and other stuff.
A better example search is Falun Gong. The US site has their official website listed, while Google.cn has nothing. Compare:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Afalundafa.o...
http://www.google.cn/search?q=site%3Afalundafa.or...
In 5 minutes of research I'm seeing 2 different sets of results for Tiananmen on google.cn, implying that a change may indeed be propagating across Google's servers right now. The "clean" version shows mostly happy families enjoying the square, while the other version shows many images and stories about the 1989 massacre.
There's been an interesting argument about that particular image search since this issue first came up several years ago. Many Chinese people, even those critical of human rights abuses, think of Tiananmen Square as a symbol of their country and the center of their society, and the massacre is only one aspect of that history. Chinese government sympathizers claim that the censored image search results better reflect the modern Chinese view of Tiananmen Square. While I'm very critical of the Chinese government, I do recognize that the tank images are both great journalism and great anti-Chinese-government propaganda.
All of that said, I'm thrilled that Google is changing their policy. It makes me proud to be part of the tech industry.
Mea culpa, Scott. I realized that in the photo I sent you I’d misspelled the name of the square. If you search for “tiananmen” (correct spelling) you don’t get tanks, but if you search for “tienamen” (my misspelling) you do.
Ditto for the Chinese words. If you search for the simplified Chinese name you don’t get tanks, and you don’t get tanks for the name of the incident itself, but if you search for the traditional Chinese word you get *really gory* pictures of tanks.