Heard this complaint many times, and I find it utterly absurd. If Google did not work with these countries, their citizens would have even less access to information than they would have otherwise.
Now I know jack **** about this, but my knee jerk reaction is to think that people need to know when their access to information is being blocked so they can act accordingly. Thus if people think google is giving them results when really it isn't then google is really doing the people it serves no favours.
I don't know if Google tells people whether the sites they're searching for are censored or not, or how it handles it, or how widespread knowledge of government censorship of web sites is. So I don't know whether there are grounds to agree or disagree with you.
On the other hand, now that the idea that people in China don't know whether Google is censoring sites has been raised, I also don't know if Google is censoring sites to me or anyone else. I remember one time when I googled for something on my laptop and desktop and got different results (even though they were on the same router). Google's search-sorting algorithms are very much proprietary, apparently, and I can only assume that the government would attempt to quietly persuade Google to take certain sites off its search results for national security or legality purposes (Nuclear weapons how-to, child pornography, etc.)
