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
  • Case Study: NZ Bus Develops Applications 60% Faster, Improves Database Performance by up to 35%
    Key Benefits: Developed applications 60% faster, Created development and test environments in minutes compared to days and weeks previously, Reduced server costs by 30% with server virtualisation, Saved NZ$40,000 in database administrator training costs, Provided high availability features that keep the database and core applications up and running in the event of a server failure, Introduced compression capabilities that improved database performance by 30% to 35%. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • Unified Monitoring™ A Business Perspective
    The enterprise computing landscape has changed dramatically. Virtualisation, outsourcing, SaaS, and cloud computing are creating fundamental changes, and ushering in an era in which enterprises distribute increasingly critical IT assets and applications across multiple service providers.This paper explores today’s computing trends and their monitoring implications in detail. In addition, it reveals how a new monitoring paradigm architecture, that uniquely addresses the monitoring realities of today’s and tomorrow’s enterprises—whether they rely on internal platforms, external service providers, or a combination of both.
    Learn more »
  • Setting a strategy for secure mobile printing
    Where, when and how we work is changing. Increasingly, we’re doing business on the road, at the office without a dedicated workstation and from our home offices. A 2010 InfoTrends survey of more than 1,400 mobile knowledge workers in Brazil, Germany, India, Japan and the U.S. echoes this trend. Respondents reported spending, on average, more than half of their time away from hard-wired network access. Implementing an effective strategy to make printing secure and simple for employees—regardless of where those employees happen to be—can help reduce security risks. Read more.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments