China orders Google to suspend some search services

Chinese regulators have ordered Google Inc. to suspend search services for foreign Web sites via its Chinese Web site, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday, a day after the company was warned over pornographic content available through its search engine.

It wasn't immediately clear if the order applies to all foreign Web sites or just certain sites. Currently, foreign Web sites are still searchable and accessible from Google's Chinese home page.

Google was also ordered to suspend searches for certain key words when summoned by unspecified regulators Thursday afternoon, the report said.

On Thursday, Google was admonished by a government-backed Internet regulator for "disseminating large amounts of pornographic and vulgar information."

It was the third time that Google had been criticized over the issue by the China Internet Information Reporting Center, which has also handed out warnings to Chinese operators such as Google rival Baidu Inc.

Google spokesman John Pinette said Friday he was unaware of any request to suspend search activities. A call to the Internet regulator's office was unanswered.

"Google met with representatives of the government to discuss problems with the Google.cn service and its serving of pornographic images and content based on foreign language searches," a Marsha Wang, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement Friday.

"This has been a substantial engineering effort, and we believe we have addressed the large majority of the problem results," the statement said.

David Wolf, chief executive of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based technology marketing firm, said Google has had technical problems with its filtering of English-language searches for pornography.

"They've been very careful with Chinese searches, the problem is with English searches," he said.

Wolf added that Google likely hasn't invested as much in self-censorhip as Chinese Internet companies, which often resort to large numbers of people to manually sweep their sites and remove objectionable material.

Beijing attempts to block access to various forms of material online, including a wide range of politically sensitive topics.

Google started its Chinese Web site in 2006 in order to accommodate Chinese censorship requirements. The Chinese site filters out search results for sensitive topics such as the 1989 crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square.

Still, Wolf said the latest campaign against Google reflected a sincere desire to rid the Chinese Web of pornography and likely wasn't directly related to political censorship