Google agrees to Chinese censorship

SEARCH ENGINE giant Google seems to have agreed to block access to sites that the Chinese authorities think will corrupt their citizens.

According to Associated Press, Google now omits results from the government-banned sites if search requests are made through computers connecting to the Internet in China. If they are made in the US they can still be found.

Of course Google didn't tell anyone about it. It appears to have been found out by Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), a research firm striving to defeat online censorship.

A DIT spokesman said that Google is cooperating with the Chinese government's censorship efforts to smooth the way for expansion plans to boost future profits. The Chinese temporarily blocked access to the company's main search engine because the search engine found sites it didn't like before relenting under public pressure.

Google admits that its Chinese language news service is leaving out results from government-banned sites.

It said that if the company displayed results from sites the Chinese government blocks, computer users would end up clicking on links that lead nowhere. µ