So what will the impact be if censorship becomes common place on search engines and on the Web in general. Well, it’s like they say: The road hell is paved with good intentions. Needless to say, this whole controversy will definitely change things for everyone online.

Indiana University researchers have created a Web site that highlights differences in query results provided by country-specific search engines, such as the version of Google built to accommodate China’s free-speech restrictions.

The idea behind CenSEARCHip is to determine the impact countries’ censorship laws have on search results. The project was largely inspired by the google.cn system that Google decided to create earlier this year for China (Yahoo and MSN have followed suit).

“We wanted to explore the results returned by major search engines and in so doing to foster an informed debate on the impact of search censorship on information access throughout the world,” said Filippo Menczer, associate professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University, in a statement. He spearheaded the project, along with Mark Meiss, a computer science doctoral student. Source: ComputerWorld

[tags]censorship,china,computer science,censearchip,free-speech restrictions,indiana university[/tags]