Google Inc, which operates the world’s biggest search engine, said yesterday it had temporarily disabled its “suggest” feature in China as part of its efforts to remove pornography from its search results.
Google said it had redesigned the home page of Google.cn to remove radio buttons that offer language and locale options. These buttons were used by a very small percentage of Google users, the company said in a statement yesterday. All other links on the home page remained unchanged, it said.
“Last Friday, we temporarily disabled our ‘suggest’ functionality because we saw in fact there were some suggestions that appeared there that we did not feel were appropriate,” Marissa Mayer, vice president for Google’s search unit, said in Taipei yesterday.
Last week, China requested that Google remove pornographic and vulgar information from its Chinese-language search engine.
Google said it had been working to remove pornography from its search results in China.
“This has been a major engineering effort, and we believe we have addressed many of the problems identified by the [Chinese] government,” it said.
In addition to Google, major global PC makers are under Chinese pressure to pre-install an Internet filter, known as the Green Dam Youth Escort, to block children’s from accessing pornography from July 1.
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