Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the brutal suppression of public protest in support of democracy in China's Tiananmen Square. The protests, which had begun on 14 April 1989, ended on 4 June when tanks from the People's Liberation Army cleared demonstrators from the square. While the exact number of deaths that resulted from this action will never be known, it seems plausible that several hundred protesters, along with a handful of police and military personnel, were killed. The carnage inflicted by the police and PLA have resulted in the event being commonly labeled as the "Tiananmen Square Massacre."
These basic facts are readily available to me through a Google search, which returns the Wikipedia article, citations for civilians killed from PBS, and the New York Times, as well as a large number of views of the now iconic image of a lone figure in a white shirt standing in front of a column of tanks (the 3 June 2009 New York Times Lens Blog carried an excellent retrospective on the "Tank Man of Tiananmen").
I do not, of course, live in China. Were I a Chinese resident that same Google search would have rendered an entirely different set of results, and even the most basic information on the Internet regarding the events of 4 June 1989 would be inaccessible to me. It seems appropriate on this anniversary to take a look back on how Google, Yahoo and Microsoft each reached the state of affairs we can observe today (and which are detailed below specifically in regard to "tiananmen square" queries): active collusion with the Chinese government in the censorship of search results.
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