Google shut down its Chinese search engine last week  Chinese web users searched for politically sensitive terms ten times more than the average after Google stopped censoring results. Searches for “Tiananmen,” “Falun Gong” and “corruption” increased substantially on Tuesday, after Google began offering uncensored Chinese-language search results on Monday, according to a New York Times report.  Subsequent web use, however, showed that Chinese users searched for similar terms much less. Although web pages were still often blocked by Chinese authorities, this appears primarily to be because of a lack of interest. Searches for “Google” itself remained relatively high.  Controversial terms were not the only ones being blocked however: results for government leaders’ names were also being censored.  According to Google Trends, there were about 2.5 million searches for phrases containing “Tiananmen” and about 4.7 million searches for the banned religious group “Falun Gong” on Tuesday. Although this represents an increase, there are 400 million Chinese web users. More than 20 million people searched for “Google” itself, implying greater interest in the search engine than in controversial information.  Meanwhile, The China Digital Times has reported that the Chinese State Council Information Office had said that all news sites must “carefully manage the information in exchanges, comments and other interactive sessions” and “clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others that have a different tune from government policy.” China routinely edits all social networking conversations, but its attitude to Google has been particularly harsh.  Chinese Twitter traffic, which is harder to censor, has been very positive about the search giant’s decision no to offer censored results, however.
In the wake of Google offering uncensored results in China, searches for    sensitive topics rose tenfold but fell back quickly.