Being in the “People’s China” (PRC), we have the — can we say this? — ”People’s Firewall” (Great Firewall; the former East Germany called their version, the Berlin Wall, the Anti-Fascism Protection Wall). With Google leaving China for obviously political reasons, the PRC now has, nearly a quarter after Google.cn’s departure, its own — “People’s Search Engine”.

The People’s Daily, known best as being the official party paper, has launched “People’s Search” (人民搜索; what an apt name!). Domain-wise, you’re going to be disappointed if you were looking for peoplessearch.cn; instead, it’s a semi-”fashionable” goso.cn. (On the Interwebs, the official organs try to get “snazzy” and “fashionable”, only to keep the censors.)

Of course, this being the official search engine, controversial content is left out. Look for the date of the Tian’anmen crackdown in Chinese, for example, and if you’re in China, you’ll get hits — which are not one bit related to the controversial event. If you’re outside China, interestingly enough, you get your connection to goso.cn cut. Yes, it’s as if the cyberofficials are saying: “We don’t want you US imperialists to go around messing about in our internal cyberaffairs in China” or something.

(Hint: the results for the Grass Mud Horse (草泥马 Caonima), as seen above, work well. That is, probably, until the Net mandarins censor the innocent alpaca as well… The Grass Mud Horse is commonly seen as representing the average Netizen, obviously in opposition to official mass censorship.)

Now for today’s dose of officialspeak: it’s claimed this search engine wants to “create an authoritative Chinese search engine” as well as “providing trusted search results”. As @spiked1989 notes on his tweet, there’s a funny side to this: just before goso.cn launched, Google, now in its uncensored version, had nearly all services become unusuable, Chinese Great Firewall be thanked.

@spiked1989 next ponders if a “People’s OS” will do for China. Your tech blogger, in the meanwhile, is taking a good, hard look at Google. With goso.cn out, it’s just a matter of time before all off Google might go under. There’s another factor in this: where does the official goso.cn leave the supposed-non-gov Baidu?