The other day I was thinking to myself about censorship. I can't remember why I started to think about this and I wondered how Google must deal with the bogus entries that pop up on the internet. It would be conceivable that these could easily overrun their search engine and become top all the time. Then I thought well actually I wonder if google censored and if so what google censored. A quick search around brought up http://www.google-watch.org/ a website that seems to be dedicated to pointing things out about Google's actions. I gave it a read. It was quite interesting and some of the things they suggest have some founding. I especially like the about the Abu Ghraib torture case - search for images and you get 1, yahoo.com have loads but I guess this could just be google being on the safe side but I guess this is censorship. I also feel they have the right to censor images results if they see fit - it is their site! Google does not censor the page links though and if you follow them you can find some rather distguisting scenes which I am not going to go into (otherwise I would have a big rant about the USA army and Donald "not as smart as the duck" Rumsfeld).
After further looking at this site it became clear to me that Google has some sort of censorship, but I feel that they are entitled to this. They have never really stood up and proclaimed themselves as the freedom for sharing information alliance (or something along those lines). They are a commercial organisation and they can do what they want. It does also appear that the person behind this site is disgruntled at google for the way his original site was dealt with their pagerank system. For more see: http://www.google-watch-watch.org/.
End of the day, though Google may appear to have some censorship - so what. Even with the case of the Abu Gharib prison you can still get the information via the search engine. It is up to them what they keep on their servers, isn't it? One final thought - remember Google doesn't always have the answer. It is not God (unless God is a bunch of computer servers and scripts.. interesting though!)!
More:
+ Google - http://www.google.co.uk/
+ Google Watch - http://www.google-watch.org/
+ Google Watch Watch - http://www.google-watch-watch.org/
+ Wiki Article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Watch
