Research on the Internet can lead to skewed results

By STEVEN W. LEWIS Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

Swords on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are not yet being beaten into shopping carts, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of the mainland and the Nationalist Party (KMT) of Taiwan are dramatically toning down their long war of words. Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT is seeking to remove trade barriers with the mainland and has shelved plans to become a full member of the United Nations. People's Republic of China's (PRC) President Hu Jintao and the CCP have recently offered their own olive branches: relief supplies for Taiwanese victims of a devastating summer typhoon, joint management of shared fisheries and direct airline flights between the former rivals.

The KMT, the CCP and the American government very much want to know what Americans will think about this new relationship. And yet even a brief examination of America's most commonly used Internet search engines reveals strong obstacles to the formation of an informed American view on the future of China and Taiwan. When we ask our search engines for information about China and Taiwan, where do they direct us?

The answer is clear: Internet search engines are inherently biased and should be used with great caution.

A comparison of the most commonly used Web search engines ? Google, Yahoo and MSN/WindowsLive/Bing, which account for 90 percent of all searches ? suggests there are three subliminal messages behind each set of search results they generate.

?Thank you for telling us about yourself: Now please shut up and listen to us tell you about yourself.? Because anybody can post information on the Web, the whole spectrum of popular views on any given subject should be found somewhere on the Internet. Unfortunately, as the case of China and Taiwan makes clear, search engines effectively stifle this diversity of voices by unfailingly directing Americans toward traditional media, government and academic Web sites.

Type ?China? or ?Taiwan? into Google, Yahoo or Bing, and look at the first 100 sites. For Google, some 75 will be links to sites of media, governments and universities overseas. For Yahoo, it is closer to 90. In America we value debate, dialogue and the free exchange of ideas. In American cyberspace, however, our search engines often lead us to hear only our own voices.

?Yes, of course I know the answer: Wait, what was the question?? Will Taiwan cease to exist as it peacefully integrates with China? Google tells us there are 643 million links to ?China,? 208 million to ?Taiwan.? Yahoo says 3.04 billion and 1.91 billion, respectively. Bing claims 229 million for ?China,? 82 million for ?Taiwan.? Taiwanese might yet take heart in these statistics, noting that their ?Web presence? per capita is greater than the PRC's on all three search engines. On the other hand, on Bing both ?Atlantis? (120 million) and ?Area 51? (470 million) generate more hits than ?Taiwan.? No search engine can access the entire universe of the Internet, and so each samples in its own quirky, idiosyncratic and mysterious way.

?Welcome to the jungle.? Taiwan is a contentious multiparty democracy. The PRC is a one-party state. A search on ?China + democracy? and ?Taiwan + democracy? on Google reveals among the 100 top results only a few links to political parties or citizen action groups. The same top-100 search on Yahoo produces more of the same for Taiwan. For ?China + democracy,? however, Yahoo generates more than 69 links to sites discussing the 2008 Guns N' Roses album Chinese Democracy. As Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye has argued, America's soft power is its massive cultural and entertainment industries. The sun never sets on the American media empire. Unfortunately, the siren song of our pop culture also leads Yahoo to recommend a music album and interviews with Axl Rose to any American earnestly seeking information about democracy in China. Welcome to the jungle, China and Taiwan