The idea of having no restrictions on a search engine is illogical. As mentioned in the topic at hand, Google has restrictions on the Chinese internet. Why? Because the Chinese government has very strict restrictions on what information their people can access. It is to my understanding that Google feels it would be better to provide a limited search engine to the Chinese people than nothing at all. This makes sense to me. Google can't take on the Chinese government; Google is providing a service in accordance with government laws. I certainly dont agree with Chinese laws or government, but if a search engine is better than no search engine. If somebody wants to take on google for restricting their search engine in China, thats not an issue to take up with Google, thats an issue to take up with the Chinese government.
Furthermore, in terms the information that the internet provides access to, it's certainly not all good. The overall objective in terms of internet restrictions should be to provide information that is useful and relevant, and block things that are useless and degenerative. In general, I think that rationale individuals would agree with this concept; the challenge is agreeing on what information is useful/useless...in other words...there is no easy solution.
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Google, in part, makes this distinction for us. The most popularly-visited websites appear first in the search results, and if they're popular, they're hopefully the ones most folks want to see and find useful. I like your stance on Google vs. China, but some folks actually do have an issue with Google. But 750 million potential customers are hard to ignore.
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