google.cn
A wise lady pointed out to me the other day that there’s not much point being upset with Google for bowing to government censorship in China. After all, that’s a requirement of doing business in that country. While the high moral ground might be to avoid participation in China, you can’t criticize a US company much for conducting business there when the US government itself is so actively promoting Chinese trade and investment.
That said, the existence of google.cn opens up some interesting possibilites; among other things, by comparing searches between google.com and google.cn, you can very easily determine what the government is censoring.
You can also guage how palatable your own site is to censors, by comparing the results of site: searches. It’s not a perfect metric. As of this writing I’ve got an FCR of 381/415 = 0.918. The low figure is largely attributable to google.com forgetting some older “orphaned” sections of my site. Still, it gives you a rough sense. I’m obviously not pissing off the right people.