By Jeffrey Goldfarb

LONDON (Reuters) - The union representing journalists in the UK and Ireland called on its 40,000 members to boycott all Yahoo Inc. products and services to protest the Internet company's reported actions in China.

The National Union of Journalists said it sent a letter on Friday to Dominique Vidal, Yahoo Europe's vice president, denouncing the company for allegedly providing information to Chinese authorities about journalists. The union also said it would stop using all Yahoo-operated services.

Yahoo has been cited in court decisions as supplying China's government with information to help them identify, prosecute and jail writers advocating democracy.

"The NUJ regards Yahoo!'s actions as a completely unacceptable endorsement of the Chinese authorities," wrote Jemima Kiss, chairman of the NUJ new media council in the letter to Vidal.

A Yahoo spokeswoman in San Francisco could not immediately be reached.

Yahoo Chairman and Chief Executive Terry Semel said last month the company had no choice but to comply with local laws and did not have the power to change Chinese policy. He added that he was seeking help from the U.S. government to urge China to allow more media freedom.

The company has been accused by the NUJ and other journalism groups of providing records that led to an eight-year prison term for Li Zhi for discussing pro-democracy issues in a Web forum and of helping identify Shi Tao, who was sentenced to prison for 10 years for forwarding a government email to the foreign press.

Kiss said the NUJ was advising all members, who include reporters, editors, photographers and illustrators, to boycott Yahoo until the company "changes its irresponsible and unethical policy".

Other Internet companies also have come under fire lately for some actions in China, including Google Inc. for saying it would block politically sensitive terms on its Web site in the country and Microsoft's MSN for shutting down a blog under Chinese government orders.

Reuters Story

Published Friday 16th June 2006 09:20 GMT

Yahoo! restricts access to more websites than any other search engine in China.

Lobby group Reporters without Borders tested Yahoo!, Google, MSN and baidu.com. It found that Yahoo! censors its results even more strictly than local portal baidu.com.

The research also found that Microsoft, which claims not to censor its results, returns very similar results to Google, which admits to filtering its content. A search using a subversive word returns 83 per cent pro-government websites on google.cn versus 78 per cent on msn.com. Perform the same search on google.com and only 28 per cent of the results will be pro-Beijing websites.

Censorship on yahoo.cn is almost complete - 97 per cent of sites returned on subversive searches support the Chinese government. In fact, researchers found that searching for "Tibet independence" or "6-4" (4 June is the anniversary of Tiananmen Square) won't just give you shonky results but will get you barred from the site for an hour.

The other search terms used were: Falungong, Tibet Independence, Democracy, Human rights, and press freedom.

The full results are available here (http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=18015). ®

Yahoo has never been a search engine per se. Even before it used bots & spidering technology, it always selected the content that it wanted to make available - not only in China, but everywhere in the world. Rather, it is a "content provider" service.

From their terms of service:
In this manner, Yahoo! has always selected the content that it wants to make available to service users, & ignored any content which it doesn't want to make available. This is entirely "at their discretion", & they don't need to give any reason for not carrying content, other than the above "we just don't feel like it". Google is no different.

This is one of the many reasons why a search agent such as Copernic will always be vastly superior to any single search "engine" (or content provision service, like Yahoo!), since, not only does Copernic list the results obtained by querying 20-odd search engines / catalogues, but it also performs its own spidering of meta-tags & returns those results as well. However, Copernic does not query Google & return any results from it, since Google's "privacy policy" (or rather, lack thereof) falls far short of the privacy standard set by Copernic.

By sticking to any single online search / content provider facility, be it Google, Yahoo! or whatever, you are agreeing that you will be limited to viewing only the results which they deem "appropriate".

Caveat emptor!