NEW DELHI, JANUARY 31 Is Tiananmen a place or a moment? Google’s image search throws up both answers, depending on which side of the Firewall of China you frame the question.

China has for long been accepted as a hotbed of censorship, but the controversy over search engine Google’s decision to curb its findings on its new Chinese language software has brewed up the debate once again: how ethical is it to submit one’s information to China’s censorship protocol?

And: is it, in fact, better to offer some information, instead of no information at all?

Last week, Google invited a storm of protest when it submitted itself to self-censorship — in China, that primarily means keeping well clear of anything the authorities may consider subversive, and applies to anything from Falun Gong to sites hosting pro-democracy rhetoric. Thereby, it won the right to have its Chinese language search engine www.google.cn on servers inside China, that is within the famous Great Firewall of China.

So, what is the difference a search engine can make? A lot, as two pictures show. Go to images.google.com and a search for Tiananmen yields an array of photographs of the protest of the summer of 1989. Now, go to images.google.cn and repeat the search, and Beijing’s landmark is shown, in soft focus and without the tanks that were rolled out almost 17 years ago.

Google — whose motto is “don’t be evil” — has invited criticism that it has been co-opted by censorship. The company argues that to the contrary, its decision is making more information accessible to millions of Chinese Internet users that would otherwise have been possible.

Its co-founder Sergey Brin, for instance, spent much of his time at the World Economic Forum at Davos explaining Google strategy. He also emphasised that in a censored search result, the page will carry this clarification: “Local regulations prevent us from showing all the results.”