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Extend of Search-Result-Censorship on Google.de

With the current discussion on the possible withdrawal of Google from the Chinese searchmarket, which is becoming more and more likely with the redirection of google.cn to google.co.hk and the push by the Chinese to get Google out of the searchmarket, we are prone to forget that Google is not only adapting the Chinese searchresults to the local requisites. Google is also changing the German searchresults in accordance with German Law, which leads them to block certain results from their SERPs.

To take a closer look at this, I analyzed a number of keywords from the SISTRIX Toolbox on if and where Google is not showing the full 10 results on the first page. In those cases, Google will show a notice that they have blocked one or more results and will give a link to ChillingEffects.org. Additionally, I only counted those occurrences that were relevant to German law – general exclusions, because of a DMCA-request, for example, were not taken into account.


For 1.000.000 keywords, I was able to get this notice for 6.017 keywords – this is, after all, 0,6 percent of searchresults, where Google.de is returning different results than Google.com (even if Google.com is set to German). If we take a closer look at these keywords, we find that about 90% of keywords have to do with porn (youporn, blowjob, horny grandmas), about 5% is due to evergreen Nazi-idiots (hitleryouth, warsongs, rudolf hess) and the last 5% are searchqueries, for which the domain is ranking for one of the first two by accident.

But we do not have to worry that Google will now leave Germany because of this censorship and start servicing the German-market from the liberal Netherlands – there have also not been any mentions of cracking-attacks on Gmail-accounts of journalists that are critical of the government.