Of those surveyed, 80 percent said they regularly use Google (GOOG) to find academic papers and nearly 60 percent said they use it to keep abreast of new research. Why Google and not Baidu, which is used as a primary search engine by only 17 percent of respondents? Because Google casts a wider net, indexing information that its Chinese rival does not. “Research without Google would be like life without electricity,” ecologist Xiong Zhenqin told Nature.

An interesting perspective on Google’s China debacle, eh? Certainly, it lends credence to the company’s claims back in 2006 that offering a censored version of services in the country was better–and more importantly–“less evil” than not offering them at all. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the time, “We concluded that although we weren’t wild about the restrictions, it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all. We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil.”

But the question of serving/not serving is more binary in these days of highly sophisticated and targeted attacks on the corporate infrastructure of American companies. Which is too bad–particularly for Chinese scholars whose work may end up as collateral damage in Google’s battle with China.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Chinese Schools Tied to Attacks on Google? Where’d You Read That, Mad Magazine?
• World War WAN: Google Hack Traced to Schools in China
• Nearly a Month After Debut, Google’s “New” Approach to China Still a Lot Like the Old One
• Google CEO: Ask Not What Google Can Do for China–Ask What China Can Do for Google
• China on “Google Farce”: Our Internet Is Open
• China to Google: No Worries, We Were Planning to Clone Those Android Phones Anyway
• U.S. State Department to Complain to China About Google Hack. Not That China’s Going to Listen.
• Microsoft: “Don’t Be Evil” Is Google’s Motto, Not Ours
• What’s the Chinese Word for Bing? Google Threatens to Leave China.

“According to complaints from many residents, Google’s English language search engine has spread large amounts of vulgar content that is lascivious and pornographic, seriously violating China’s relevant laws and regulations,” foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a regularly scheduled news conference. “I’d like to stress that google.com, as an Internet enterprise providing services in China, should earnestly abide by Chinese laws and regulations.”

The disruption of Google (GOOG) services follows a widely criticized mandate from Beijing requiring all computers sold in the country to include Green Dam, an application designed to prevent citizens from viewing “offensive” content, which in the Chinese government’s case includes all manner of material. From a report by the Open Net Initiative, an academic consortium dedicated to the study of censorship and surveillance:

The version of the Green Dam software that we tested, when operating under its default settings, is far more intrusive than any other content control software we have reviewed. Not only does it block access to a wide range of web sites based on keywords and image processing, including porn, gaming, gay content, religious sites and political themes, it actively monitors individual computer behavior, such that a wide range of programs including word processing and email can be suddenly terminated if content algorithm detects inappropriate speech. The program installs components deep into the kernel of the computer operating system in order to enable this application layer monitoring. The operation of the software is highly unpredictable and disrupts computer activity far beyond the blocking of websites.

…The deeply intrusive nature of the software opens up several possibilities for use other than filtering material harmful to minors. With minor changes introduced through the auto-update feature, the architecture could be used for monitoring personal communications and Internet browsing behavior. Log files are currently recorded locally on the machine, including events and keywords that trigger filtering. The auto-update feature can used to change the scope and targeting of filtering without any notification to users.