14 DAY TRIAL // If China decides to censor a local website, nobody gets too amazed because such cases occur every once in a while and people have started getting used to it. However, a similar matter was spotted a few days ago and, at this time, nobody can say for sure if the one that imposed the censorship is actually Google or the Chinese government. Following the recent call for boycott on Carrefour of the Chinese residents, the French supermarket became unavailable if searched on Google, the search engine returning just a simple blank page telling you there's no information available.
According to Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped, it all started because "many Chinese are currently reportedly angered at France for an attack against a wheelchair-bound Olympic torch bearer that took place in France, as well as Paris awarding honorary citizenship to the current Dalai Lama of the Tibetan Buddhists."
Nobody knows for sure the reason for Carrefour getting censored but, at the first look, it all seems to be an attempt of the Chinese government to reduce the protests targeting Carrefour and how else can you do that if not by banning one of the most popular search engines on the web? However, it's interesting to see if Baidu, which is said to be even more popular than Google in China, has also banned Carrefour from showing in its search results...
Have a look at the adjacent picture and notice the weird things appearing on it. First of all, there's the message informing the user that "You cannot access information of this search result, please return to google.cn for other information." Moreover, the footer of the blank website says the page was created in 2006, which is quite uncanny for a link stored by Google.
At this time, the main page of Google, Google.com, shows more than 14 million results, none of them being available through the Chinese flavor of the search engine.