I just read this on PC WORLD.
China approved of Google’s efforts to filter porn from search
results on its China portal following state-led criticism of the links,
the former head of Google China said Sunday.
The row with Beijing
cooled down in July, after government censors met with Google and
revoked a suspension of some features on its site, Kai-Fu Lee, former
president of Greater China for Google, wrote on a Chinese blog.
State-run
media and a Chinese government watchdog in June slammed Google for
allowing pornographic links to appear in search results on Google.cn,
the company’s China portal. China also briefly blocked nationwide
access to Google.com and other Google Web sites and ordered the company
to suspend “foreign Web site search services” until the links were
removed.
Google changed its search algorithm to filter
pornographic results, but it had remained unclear if censors were
satisfied. Lee said multiple heads of government bureaus revoked the
suspension and praised Google for having a “serious attitude” toward
fighting low-brow content.
Lee, who left Google last week, said
his move was unrelated to the government row and that he stayed at
Google two months longer than he originally planned to handle the
affair. Lee will be starting a venture in Beijing that provides angel
investment and guidance for young local entrepreneurs, he said on the
blog.
Google.cn has long filtered out some results for sensitive
searches. The search engine displays a notice that some results have
been filtered for search terms such as “Tiananmen,” the square in
Beijing around which soldiers killed hundreds to disperse a student
democracy protest in 1989, or for the names of major political leaders.
The search engine currently displays no search results at all for “Xu
Zhiyong,” the name of a human rights lawyer recently detained for about
one month. The results screen says the search “may touch on content
that does not conform with the related laws, regulations and policies”
and that results cannot be displayed.
A Google spokeswoman asked
for comment about the search filtering last month said Google, as a
global company, “should strictly comply with local laws, regulations
and policies.”
Baidu, the dominant Chinese search company and
Google’s main rival in the country, also filters search results and
tells users it has done so for sensitive searches.