Published: June 19, 2009
BEIJING — The Chinese government disabled some search functions on the Chinese-language Web site of Google Friday, saying the site was linking too often to pornographic and vulgar content. Government officials met with managers of the Chinese operations of Google on Thursday afternoon to warn them that the company would be punished if the Web site was not purged of the offending material, according to a report Friday by Xinhua, the state news agency.
Earlier on Thursday, a government-supported Internet watchdog group, the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center, had criticized the search engine for its erotic content and threatened punishment from the government. The group had said that Google had already been warned twice, in January and April, about its content.
On Friday evening, it appeared that the associative-word feature of the Web site had been disabled. That is the function that displays a drop-down menu of words related to a search word that is typed into the search engine. The previous evening, reporters on China Central Television, the state television network, showed how typing in the Chinese word for son, erzi, could pull up associated terms that have lewd connotations.
State news organizations also reported that the ability to use Google's Chinese site to search overseas Web sites was supposed to be disabled, but that feature was still working on Friday evening.
Google released a statement saying it was making greater efforts to clean up its Chinese Web site. "We have been continually working to deal with pornographic content, and material that is harmful to children, on the Web in China," the statement said.
Though Google dominates the search engine market in the United States, it is struggling here to unseat Baidu, which has long been the most popular Chinese search engine.
Recent efforts by the Chinese government to limit access to the Internet have been met with outrage by Chinese computer users. The strongest reaction has been to the government's plan to force computer makers to install Internet censorship software on all computers sold in China after July 1. Critics say the software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, could be used to censor Web sites with content deemed politically unacceptable, even though the government says the main use of the software will be to block access to pornography.
Computer experts also say the software can make a computer vulnerable to infiltration by hackers. This week, developers said they had found fixes to the problems. But on Friday, J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan, said that a patched version of Green Dam had a security problem that was just as serious as the original one.
In a paper posted on the Internet, Mr. Halderman said it had taken him and his research team only one hour to find the new problem.
"This suggests that the security problems in Green Dam will be harder to fix than the government has suggested," he said in an e-mail message. "It's probably going to be impossible to make the software safe enough ahead of the July 1 deadline."
Andrew Jacobs contributed reporting, and Huang Yuanxi contributed research.
