Sensitive websites such as the Tiananmen Square democracy, Tibet, and regional independence movement which are normally filtered, were able to be viewed through Google China on Tuesday in Beijing. This following a statement made by Google saying they would no longer abide by Beijing’s censorship regulations.

Is it possible Google has dropped censorship for their Chinese search engine?

According to Google China filtering is still active on the search engine and they insist their policies have not changed. But for the people of Beijing, I’m sure that doesn’t seem to be the case.

NBC did a public search through Google.cn for a couple commonly censored searches to test the theory. One search being “Xinjiang independence” which pulled a Wikipedia entry for the top result about the East Turkestan independence movement. Another search was made for the non-profit group the “Tibet Information Network” whom never really agreed with China’s policies. A third search was done on the ever popular, but I’m sure very controversial image of the “Tank Man” (shown below) which did in fact show the one image that was formerly censored. But only a single image, not several like our US based image searches.

A few more final searches were made; “June 4″ typed in Chinese characters; the term used for the Tiananmen protests in China which also brought up a single image of the Tank Man. And a final search for “Tiananmen Square Massacre” was made, intentionally using “massacre” as opposed to “incident” for obvious reasons; which listed hundreds of results regarding military crack downs on protesters on June 4, 1989.  Along with the other search results, popped up the “Unknown Rebel” that stood blocking a line of tanks.

These search results were all just a click away from being viewed.

Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of the Beijing based media tracking website danwei.org says that indeed the search filters, do not seem to be fully working but also adds that no one knows exactly what’s going on.

While occasional searches did seem to deny access to the controversial websites that were once completely denied, it’s definitely a noticeable difference compared to six months ago.

Even after all of this, Google US spokesman, Scott Rubin said that the censorship has not ceased, and their operations have not changed but he still did not confirm (or deny) whether the Google.cn site is being shut down or not, regardless of rumors on the Chinese news networks.

Eric Shmidt, CEO, commented last week that something will happen soon, while Rubin had no further details and another  Google spokesman put the blame on the Chinese government, saying the change may have occurred when they altered the site. None the less, Google says they are trying to compromise with Beijing and their extensive web controls even after their previous January 12th announcement saying the company would no longer comply.

China’s industry minister did say that the company does have to obey the laws and that there are no other options short of shutting the search engine down, which consumes about 35 percent of China’s search market. However, the only people that will likely feel the burn on this situation are the Chinese companies and local web surfers who rely on Google for search, maps, and other services.

While the extent of what may happen if Google Inc. does in fact bail on China due to the censorship and hacking conflict, is unclear. I think we’re all pretty sure Google won’t go under if they do decide not to work with China.