Google is changing its search service in China so that it will warn users when they are using terms likely to trigger interference from the authorities and suggest ways around the censorship.
The move is likely to further strain already tense relations between the internet giant and Beijing.
"Over the past couple years, we’ve had a lot of feedback that Google search from mainland China can be inconsistent and unreliable. It depends on the search query and browser, but users are regularly getting error messages like ‘this webpage is not available’ or ‘the connection was reset’. And when that happens, people typically cannot use Google again for a minute or more," Google said in a blogpost on Thursday. The company said it had assessed its systems and failed to find any internal problems. The issues were "correlated with searches for a particular subset of queries," said Google.
(Source: guardian.co.uk)