Google Tips Off Users in China

By LORETTA CHAO

Google Inc. has begun warning users in China of certain search words that may trigger the country's Internet censors, in its boldest challenge in two years to Beijing's efforts to restrict online content.

Google has begun notifying users in China when they use search terms that can trigger China's Internet blocks, in its boldest challenge in two years to Beijing's efforts to restrict online content, Scott Austin reports on digits. Photo: Google.

The Internet company unveiled on its Hong Kong-based search site this week a new mechanism that identifies political and other sensitive terms that may cause service interruptions by Chinese authorities.

For example, when users in China search for keywords like "carrot" in Chinese?which contains the character for Chinese President Hu Jintao's surname?a yellow dropdown message says: "We've observed that searching for 'hu' in mainland China may temporarily break your connection to Google. This interruption is outside Google's control."

Google acknowledged on its blog Thursday that users in China are having trouble accessing its services, saying failed searches can cause temporary outages on the site. The post is careful not to mention censorship or explicitly say Chinese authorities are the cause.

"Users are regularly getting error messages like 'This webpage is not available' or 'The connection was reset,'" the post said.

Associated Press

A Chinese flag flutters at Google's China headquarters in Beijing.

Google says it hopes the alerts "will help improve the search experience in mainland China," where Google's search and other services have been unstable since it entered a public spat with Chinese authorities over censorship more than two years ago. A Google spokesman declined to comment further.

Chinese officials don't discuss their Internet restrictions, and its restricted search terms are treated as state secrets. In its post, Google said the trigger terms were identified based on reviews of the outcomes of the 350,000 most popular search queries in China, not an official list.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said at a regular press briefing Friday that "there are more than 500 million Internet users in China, and they have access to plenty of information?Like other countries, China also administers its Internet according to law."

China's restrictions include the names of top leaders as well as high-profile dissidents like blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng and references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown, according to Internet observers.

China censors the Internet in a few ways, say industry experts. For overseas sites it uses Web filtering technology to limit traffic to Web pages containing objectionable keywords. In some cases, it blocks entire sites, as it does with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

For domestic sites, it wields the power to shut them down if they don't police themselves in accordance with government requests. Sites like Baidu Inc. and the Web portal operated by Sina Corp. notify users when search results for terms are omitted due to rules and regulations, but they don't specify which terms have fallen afoul of censors.

Google's move is its most significant related to China's Internet restrictions since early 2010, when it publicly said it wouldn't adhere to China's censorship policies and said it might have to shut down its Google.cn China site as well as its offices there. Google ultimately kept its China offices but moved its Web search and other services to Hong Kong, where it doesn't have to comply with regulations in mainland China.

But for users in mainland China, Google's search site and other services such as Gmail are frequently disrupted by the government's Web-filtering system.

As a result, Google has been losing market share in China, according to research firm Analysys International, which estimates the company had a 17% share of search revenue in the country in the first quarter, down from 36% in the fourth quarter of 2009. Google executives have said revenue is still growing. In comparison, Baidu had a 79% share in the first quarter.

Still, Google has expanded its operations within the country, adding engineers and sales staff to work on other products, including its Android mobile operating system and services that don't require official censorship, such as e-commerce.

Analysts say Google's latest move could jeopardize some of its recent efforts.

Google, in a move to squeeze more cash out of its lucrative Web-search engine, is converting its free product-search service into a paid one. Drew Dowell has details on The News Hub. Photo: Getty Images.

"It does seem like a move that would be perceived as antagonistic by Chinese Internet authorities," said Jeremy Goldkorn, director of Danwei.com, which researches Chinese media and Internet.

On Friday, a number of Chinese Internet users appeared confused by Google's move.

"Has Google also started to 'harmonize' sensitive words?" wrote a user on Sina Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-like microblogging site, going by the name Chester_Hahn, using a term often used in China to mock censorship.

Others joked about it. "Google, you are trying to flip someone's miniskirt up again! You bad boy," wrote one user by the name Xi Gang. Another called Jiu Xian said, "Poor carrot. You are shot even when you have nothing to do with anything sensitive. You are so unlucky to share the same surname, Hu, with our beloved president."

?Yang Jie and Lingling Wei contributed to this article.

Write to Loretta Chao at loretta.chao@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared June 2, 2012, on page B1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Google Tips Off Users In China.

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