The Chinese government is coming down heavily on Google. On Friday the Chinese government disabled some of the crucial functions of Google’s search functionalities. The Chinese government explained this blocking of certain aspects of Google search site saying that it is promoting pornographic and adult content. Officials from the Chinese government had a meeting with Google China to issue them a warning stating that they may have to face severe action from the government if pornographic content and offending data were not removed from its searches. Reports state that the Chinese government has taken an uncompromising stand on this issue and there is no room for talks or discussions.
The Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center criticized Google for promoting pornographic and erotic content in the country and warned the company of such issues. This is not the first time that Google has been issues such warnings. As per reports Google China has received such warnings at least twice in previous occasions, once in January and the second warning in April. Now the Chinese government has taken a severe stand and it is not ready to tolerate any such issues.
Further to its warnings, the Chinese government had disabled the associative word feature of Google search to curb the menace on pornographic content. Associative word feature nothing but the keywords suggestion drop down menu that appears when we make a search in Google. Google displays words that are close to the keywords typed by the user to help them to find the information they are looking for faster. This feature seems to be causing issues and the China Central Television, which is the state television network demonstrated how typing certain Chinese words can return suggestions of terms that have vulgar connotations.
There are also reports that point to the fact the ability of Google China to make searches on foreign websites which were supposed to have been deactivated but this feature was still active on Friday evening.
As per Google’s response to this action taken by the Chinese government, the company is making a lot of efforts to keep the Chinese version of Google as clean as possible. They are constantly making improvements in this area to keep off pornographic content and data that can harm children.
While Google is still trying to gain the Chinese market, this action from the Chinese government comes as a severe blow to the company as it is already losing out to Baidu. Recently, the Chinese government has been very strict in dealing with issues that are similar to these and they readily come up with sanctions against the perpetrators of pornographic content on the web in China. It has even tried to limit internet access to people and this has not received any welcome from the internet community in China.
