The Second Sputnik Is a Heavily Censored Search Engine

The original Sputnik represented a revolutionary, exciting leap forward in technology. But its latest incarnation—as a search engine—is about as dourly regressive as it gets: it actively censors information. Russia’s newest government-friendly search engine was unveiled today by state-owned telecom giant Rostelecom at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum.

Rostelecom is positioning Sputnik.ru as a way to connect citizens unfamiliar with the internet to state-approved news coverage, websites, and official information. The idea, a Rostelecom rep said in a statement, is to help families engage with public services and institutions: “We’ve indexed over 10 billion documents on the Russian Internet, picking the most reliable, full and official sources of information.” This may sound innocuous enough, but what the company chooses not to index amounts to censorship.

Sputnik filters its search results to guard users from extremism, child pornography, and other, more ambiguous, kinds of “search manipulation,” Rostelecom president Alexei Basov told ITAR-TASS. Sputnik’s site is down at time of writing, though it’s slated to be up and running in beta mode now. While there’s plenty of local reportage and press releases to glean insight from, until it’s live we won’t know for sure how extensive its censorship is. But we do know for certain that it is filtered to a large degree and in line with Russian media policies, which have long displayed a seriously repressive bent.

Planning for Sputnik began in 2008, after Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was angered by Google and Yandex, the country’s two most popular search engines, for displaying articles that he deemed anti-Kremlin during Russia’s invasion of Georgia.

Since then, Russia has clamped down on internet freedom by creating an “internet blacklist” to block sites that violate Russian policy. In March, Alexei Navalny’s popular anti-Putin blog was blocked, and in 2012, Facebook was briefly on the list. “We can block Twitter or Facebook in Russia tomorrow, in a matter of minutes,” Maxim Ksenzov, the deputy head of state communications regulator Roskomnadzor, said in an interview recently. Though Ksenzov’s comments were publicly admonished as premature by Medvedev himself, he stood by his statement.

Yandex and Google have so far managed to stay off the blacklist, but Yandex has come under fire from government officials wishing to classify it as a media organization, making it subject to Russia’s usual content restrictions.

Sputnik continuesthis trend of governmental control over the internet in Russia, but there’s of course no telling if the service will actually catch on with the public.

Google and Yandex together control upwards of ninety percent of the search engine market in Russia. Before Sputnik’s launch, many assumed that it would compete by becoming the default search engine for state employees. It made sense, because public sector employees account for roughly twenty-five percent of Russia’s working population, according to the Moscow Times.

This month, Rostelcom won a government contract to provide internet access to more than thirteen thousand villages, providing the perfect opportunity to roll out Sputnik as a way for villagers unaccustomed to the internet to navigate it.

Rostelecom’s vast resources and the government’s support could mean that Sputnik will eventually rival Google and Yandex in Russia, although probably not without a good amount of string-pulling. If that happens, Sputnik will be a major victory for Russian officials looking to tighten their control of the web and a loss for freedom of information on Russia’s internet.