Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Google censors China porn searches

Google disbled Google Suggest features on Google.cn and made several other changes to block smut

Google engineers have put in place several measures to remove pornography from search results in China, after the government warned the company its filter was too weak.

Google has temporarily disabled the Google Suggest feature on Google.cn and developed an automated system to remove pornographic links from search results, said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and the user experience, at a meeting in Taipei.

The company has also redesigned the Google.cn home page to remove the radio buttons that offer language and locale options, Google said in a statement. The rest of the home page remains the same.

"Google has been working to remove pornography from our search results in China, in accordance with our operating license there," the statement says. "This has been a major engineering effort, and we believe we have addressed many of the problems identified by the government."

China last week ordered Google to suspend its foreign Web site search service over the issue.

One search user in Beijing said the measures had made finding porn much more difficult via Google.cn, mainly from obvious search words such as "porn." However, he could still find some obscene material when searching in English and using slang or other less common words. Pornographic Bittorrent download links were also still available through the results.

Google's main English search page at Google.com continued to offer pornographic search results in China.

China's warning to Google last week comes amid a broad crackdown against online smut in the nation that has seen the shutting of thousands of Web sites and the creation of controversial censoring software, Green Dam Youth Escort, that blocks pornographic and politically sensitive content, and is to be installed on all computers sold in China as of the beginning of July.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Google
References show all

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: censorship, China, internet content filtering
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Top Ten Considerations when Deploying IT Operations Management in the Cloud
    IT organisations must be able to quickly deliver and securely manage new business and IT services at fraction of the cost. This means that every IT organisation must reconsider how they approach IT operations and business service management. As a result, many IT organisations are looking to the cloud for its promised benefits of reducing total cost of ownership, requiring less technical skill set and very fast time to value.
    Learn more »
  • Security Threat Report 2012
    This threat report shares the latest research on hacktivism, online threats, mobile malware, cloud computing, and social network security looking ahead to the coming year.
    Learn more »
  • Eight threats your antivirus won’t stop - Why you need endpoint security
    News headlines are a constant reminder that malware attacks and data loss are on the rise. High-profile incidents that make big news might seem out of the ordinary. Yet businesses of every size face similar risks in the everyday acts of using digital technology and the Internet for legitimate purposes. This paper outlines eight common threats that traditional antivirus alone won’t stop, and explains how to protect your organisation using endpoint security.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments

HP and IDG news, product videos and resources