Welcome to CenSEARCHip! This is a tool developed by Mark Meiss and Filippo Menczer at the Indiana University School of Informatics in March of 2006 to allow you to explore the differences in the results returned by different countries' versions of the major search engines. We currently work with the Web search and image search functions of four national versions of Google and Yahoo!: the United States, China, France, and Germany.
When you enter your search terms and select one of the search buttons, the lower part of your browser window will show a split display of the results for the two countries. For example, if you're comparing China and the United States, you'll see information about the Chinese search on the left and the United States search on the right.
When you click the "Web Search" button, each side of the display will first show you an estimate of how many English-language results the search engine has for that national version. Our system will then begin downloading the top few pages that are unique to that country's results. As the pages are downloaded, you'll see a set of words of varying size in each half of the display.
We get those words by breaking the pages up into individual terms, throwing out some common noise words ("and", "the", etc.), and tallying up the results. We then find the 50 words that have the highest relative frequency of use on each side and draw them in a font size proportional to their frequency. For example, if you see that the word violin is very large on the Chinese side of the display, that means that the pages unique to the Chinese search results use the word violin much more often than the pages unique to the United States search results.
Things are a bit more simple when you click the "Image Search" button. In this case, each side of the display shows images returned in the first page of search results only by that country's search engine.
Warning: In order to give as accurate a comparison as possible, we've disabled the "SafeSearch" feature that search engines use to block images with explicit violent or sexual content from their search results. Some of the images returned may be quite graphic and inappropriate for children. Please exercise caution in your searches!