CHINESE SEARCH ENGINE
The government of the People's Republic of China is backing a new search engine called Accoona.com. I'm happy to report that the search term tiananmen square massacre actually turns up half-way relevant results. Oddly, the top response is a travel guide, folloed by some guy's pictures of the square and the bio of a BBC reporter. I'm not saying the engine is designed to give such bad answers on purposes to such a query. Heck, the search engine may just suck on its own, independent of the communist government's general efforts to whitewash and prevent access to certain information on the Internet.

Google gives some rather more relevant results. Including a wikipedia entry describing the barbaric crackdown and actual discussion as university websites of what happened that day.

Let's try china prevents access to web sites. Hmm. Google gives us Amnesty International's site as its top response, with the headline "China: Internet users at risk of arbitrary detention, torture and ...", then a BBC report about China blocking Google under its "Red Firewall". Lot's of good hits about detentions of bad internet users in China.

Accoona gives us the completely irrelevant site www.bizwiz.com as its top response. Only one page is even slightly relevant to China's activities against web users, and its a site called unitethecows.com, which refers to the fact that "China has been accused of blocking access to Google News." Ah, an accusation.

Accoona does better on "Rape of Nanking", but not as well as Google.

Oh, and the thing is backed by some prominent Americans.