Internet censorship is nothing new in China, but now the mere suggestion of something the communist government doesn’t approve of is enough to get Google in trouble.

According to the New York Times, Chinese government officials met with representatives from Google’s Chinese operations this past week with orders to disable certain features of its search engine.  Of particular concern to the communist country was the suggestion feature, known as Google Suggest, whereby if you type in a phrase, Google suggests other possible things that may interest you.

It seems the trouble began when the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center, an Internet-watchdog group that is backed by the government, complained about lewd content on the site and threatened them with punishment by the government.  They also said that Google has already been warned twice this year, in January and April, over the same problem.  The report indicated that if you enter certain Chinese words in to the search bar, it was returning suggestions that the group said had lewd meanings.

As of Friday evening local time, the feature had been turned off, but there are conflicting reports as to the possibility that China is also having Google turn off the ability to search foreign Web sites as well.

The relationship between Google and China has been a strained one to be sure.  During the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising earlier this month, it appears that Google may have complied with the government’s order to temporarily muzzle its service, but Google is still declining to comment on that report.  CNet News reports that around June 4th, the actual anniversary date, using Google’s Chinese site found that no results were returned when searching for the mere name of the location, and this even included travel sites totally unrelated to the student uprising.

If Google Suggest will remain offline permanently is not known at this time, or if it may be allowed to come back online after some tweaking by Google’s engineers.  Only time will tell.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 3:06 pm under Google, Politics.

Read more entries by Sean P. Aune.
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