Censorship Watch - Google

If you thought Google was a 100% dependable search tool for the World Wide Web, think again. It is actively involved in censoring certain results from its searches. Although Google spiders or web-bots know a site exists that may very well be just what you are looking for or have the info you need Google may try to prevent you from seeing links to these sites if they are on the Google list of banned sites. People who use already restrictive ISPs like AOL are not likely to ever see these sites in most searches they do using Google.

I have done some experimenting and found that whatever the method is for eliminating taboo links from their search results it is fortunately not full proof. If you are persistant and know enough about what you are looking for to really narrow your search criteria down you can still get the censored results. But for the majority of researchers and casual web readers out there these results would probably hardly ever come up in their searches.

For an example. I frequently want to find information provided by the Christian Separatist Church Society which is blacklisted by Google. In order to search for ChristianSeparatist.org results I have to go into advanced search settings and explicitly designate the URL christianseparatist.org as the target of my search. This works but it excludes all other results which I might like to see. So it is a definate inconvenience as I have to do multiple searches if I want a complete and unbiased list of results. Now that I know of this list of Google's banned sites I can include some more of them into my searches.

Specific Sites Excluded from Google.fr and/or Google.de