Google says “Gao Ye” is a sensitive word in any form

Gao Ye on Focus Interview

When CCTV revealed that Google China was allowing Internet users on the mainland to search for pornography, the station’s Focus Interview program interviewed a college student named Gao Ye (高也), who described how one of his classmates had relapsed into a porn fixation after finding explicit images in a Google search.

Gao was quickly unmasked as an intern at CCTV, raising questions about the veracity of his statement in the interview and the broadcaster’s own professional ethics. Netizens have been actively discussing the issue ever since.

Like many other controversial issues that portray the authorities in a negative light, Gao Ye’s CCTV interview has been entered onto the list of “filtered words”: search results on Baidu are screened, and Google.cn returns no results at all, reports the Devils Haircut blog:

I had always thought that “Green Daddy” would become the big joke story of the year, but I never imagined that even more laughs would be generated when wise and wonderful CCTV went after Google China in the name of “obscenity.” And under this new view, Google China has made swift changes, boosting its word filters, so that our little friend Gao Ye, the student who told Focus Interview that one of his classmates had become high-strung after viewing pornographic pictures on Google, has vanished from Google search results. What’s more, Google results for phrases containing 高也 (“Gao Ye”) returns “Your search results may involve content that violates laws, regulations, and policies, and cannot be displayed.” And the results of a sentence like “It’s no good even if you’re tall” (你长得高也没用) are illegal too. Hahahahaha. At the same time, Baidu, another China-based, foreign-funded company, doesn’t seem to be so spooked. Searching for the keyword 高也 returns some irrelevant results along with the sentence, “According to relevant laws, regulations, and policies, some of your search results have not been displayed.” And searching for Focus Interview and Gao Ye together returns things related to Focus Interview’s faked interview of one of its own.

Whenever he discusses any topics having to do with the Celestial Kingdom, my roommate always says that our party is playing a giant game of chess (sometimes they’re playing a giant game of mahjong….) But when you think about it, there’s a bit of truth here. First, I’ve seen articles that said when Google first entered the China market and was frustrated by the XXX affair, upper management spoke with the central authorities in the hopes of obtaining a list of keywords so as to cooperate with the enforcement of China’s “relevant” rules and regulations, but the Publicity Department was unwilling to provide a foreign-funded company with that justification and therefore refused to hand over a list of keywords. So Google had to rely on guesswork to stay in line with the sacred intentions….it was likely shortly after Green Dam was let loose with the most complete list of words and its crappy encryption technology that all of the keywords were made public on the Internet….and right after that was CCTV’s hatchet job on Google, and then Google expressed its willingness to cooperate….isn’t there a huge chessboard lying behind this whole string of news stories? The purpose of Green Dam was to let loose the mysterious “filtered words” list, and then kill Google as a warning to other companies….what happens next follows quite naturally. It’s a shame that the fine company behind Green Dam would dare to risk world condemnation but would come out with such an inferior piece of software solely so that people would crack it, implicitly making public Big Brother’s list of filtered words….

I recommend that Kai-fu Lee and his team work overtime to seize this opportunity for Google China to do a special government-authorized harmonious edition. Only then will true harmony come…

Google.CN search for “你长得高也没用”. Note that the sensitive phrase is screened even from the search box.