Do Chinese people eat babies?

The respected apologist website EastSouthWestNorth recently translated a blog post from a Chinese forum about Google's search recommendations. It's a fascinating insight into Chinese paranoia, and I'm afraid, yes, that's what I'll dismiss it as.

The gist of it is that if you start typing searches, Google presents a dropdown list based, ostensibly, on popular searches and available material run through some mysterious algorithm.

The forum poster discovered that if you type "Chinese" Google responds with a list of suggestions that look like this:

The poster then uses Google Trends, in China, to support a claim that Google itself rigs up these responses. Who knows? Read it for yourself, and try it out. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. I just want to point out that Google Trends in China might not be using the same history database as Google Trends in other countries, since news sources seem to be locally aggregated.

What I also want to point out is that the sacred Chinese are not alone. They might be happy to know Japanese people don't have souls, and are thought to have similar culinary habits.

The Irish are apparently inscrutable:

The English have nice smiles:

The Indians have noses, is what I think it means:

The Koreans are rude, insomniac pet eaters:

The president of America has a chain and great music:

Google itself is pretty threatening:



It's a total myth that Western people are scared of being dominated by China:

There's no such thing as a stupid question:

And, this one leaves no ambiguity:

I'm sorry, but I think what happens here is the same as what I did in the title of this post: People ask questions. That's what search engines tend to get quite often. Google collates the seperate words. This post will in the future add one to the "Chinese people eat babies" meme. And if you're wondering about it and go type: "Do Chinese people eat babies?" into Google, you'll add one. Also, if you type: "Why do ignorant imperialist running pigdog west think chinese people eat babies?" you'll add another one.

And pretty soon all your China's will type it, and their China's and their China's China's.

Goodbye global warming.

Finally: Google isn't being evil here. Search engines are descriptive: they demostrate people's stupidity.