An Internet monitoring group has discovered that the Chinese-language version of The Epoch Times and other independent Chinese news media are not available inside China on the popular search engine Google.

Bill Xia says that the first inkling that Google News was blocking news articles from independent Chinese news sites inside China came from volunteers at his company, Dynamic Internet Technology. The volunteers discovered that search results for certain news topics were different when they used Google’s China search engine inside China as compared to overseas.

“DynaWeb volunteers reported their findings to us, and we then did more concrete research,” Xia said.

According to Xia’s findings (available online at http://www.dit inc.us/report/google200409/google.htm), search results that are not displayed in China include news articles from The Epoch Times and other independent Chinese news media. Xia says that DynaWeb was able to confirm the results by using proxy servers in China.

Xia provided screenshots of how the search results look when DynaWeb used Google News China’s search from the U.S., and how they look through a proxy server inside China. An example shown in his report illustrates how a search for a Chinese poet returned three results from the U.S. (two from The Epoch Times), but none in China.

"The Epoch Times makes available to people information that they can't find elsewhere in other media," according to John Nania, an editor for the English-language version of the news site. "If this blocking of information by Google is intentional, I would be surprised to learn that a large media corporation would risk its reputation for profit or other short-term advantage."

When asked about the implications of this issue, Xia told The Epoch Times, “I’m worried that Google is bowing to the pressure from the Chinese government. That’s a bad thing. For the users in China, this will reinforce China’s media control in creating a fake reality. I call it the China Matrix.”

According to Google spokesperson Debbie Frost, the search engine chooses not to display results for sites that are unavailable in China. “Google has decided that in order to create the best possible search experience for our mainland China users we will not include sites whose content is not accessible, as their inclusion does not provide a good experience for our News users who are looking for information,” she said in a written statement.

This explanation worries Xia, who says, “Even though those websites are themselves blocked, the title and description presented when the search results are returned on Google are very important. It helps Chinese people see that there is something beyond what they are shown by media in China. By blocking that information, it creates an illusion that the whole world is in line with Chinese state-run media.”

Frost says that Google News China, which the company launched on September 9th for those who want to browse in simplified Chinese, is still in its Beta testing phase and that the company will continue to make improvements.