Ethan Zuckerman is testing out Google.cn, the new Chinese version of the Google search portal, and has facinating some in-the-weeds thoughts on how the whole thing works. If I'm reading Ethan right, his working hypothesis is that Google China censors search results in one of two ways -- searches terms trigger either (1) a search of the whole web with results then filtered through a blacklist; or (2) a search of only a preapproved subset of the web hosted in China. So far, Ethan has found that search for "democracy" produces full-web-but-filtered results while a search for "falun gong" triggers a China subset-only search. Testing out in which of the two ways Google China responds to searches for different terms could, Ethan says, "provide an interesting map of what topics are merely controversial and which are completely off limits." Really fascinating stuff. Much more on it here.