According to Google “all necessary steps” will be taken to make its Chinese language portal, Google.cn, free of pornographic links.
By now almost everyone is aware of the Great Firewall of China, the Chinese Government’s mega plan of internet censorship and surveillance. So what’s the relationship between China and Search Engines like? Well, to say the least, it’s complicated. And the fore runner from the search engines side is obviously the big daddy of search, Google.
According to a recent report by Xinhua, the Chinese Government noticed that a lot of Chinese language search results contained pornographic links and wanted it blocked. The Chinese Government wants these particular Chinese search results blocked so they can’t be accessed from any country. The English search queries would remain unaffected though.
The report which was released on Thursday says:
[Google China] admitted that a “huge amount of porn and lewd information” had been disseminated by the website, which was a serious violation of Chinese laws and regulations and harmful to minors’ physical and psychological health.
The next day Google disabled the associated word feature where Google suggests search keywords in a drop down box in real time as you type your search query in the search box. According to NYT, the night before the associated word feature was disabled, the state run Chinese Central Television showed how searching for Son in Chinese (erzi) pulled up a variety of associated search queries, many of which were objectionable.
So finally all this prompted Google’s communication director John Pinette to issue the statement: “We are undertaking a thorough review of our service and taking all necessary steps to fix any problems with our results”
Obviously this isn’t the first time Google and China are at it. In January this year, Google announced that it’ll censor China web searches and then another issue cropped up in April where Google published images which were of strategic importance to the Chinese.
With more than 300 million users (as of December 2008 source), China is clearly one of the biggest markets for Google.
