Google Trying to Maintain Their Search Service in China

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Google is walking a file line with maintaining service in China since disputes over political censorship have strained their dialogue with the country's government.

A blog post today by Google reports that, although a simple redirect from the Google.cn homepage to Google.com.hk has worked well for most of the Chinese speaking userbase of the site, the Chinese government is none to pleased with the unfiltered results, and as a result may revoke Google's license to operate in the country.

We currently automatically redirect everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, our Hong Kong search engine. This redirect, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese, has been working well for our users and for Google. However, it’s clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable—and that if we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it’s up for renewal on June 30). Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn—so Google would effectively go dark in China.

That’s a prospect dreaded by many of our Chinese users, who have been vocal about their desire to keep Google.cn alive. We have therefore been looking at possible alternatives, and instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.

Over the next few days we’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all our Chinese users to our new landing page—and today we re-submitted our ICP license renewal application based on this approach.

It remains to be seen if the Chinese government will accept this compromise, or if Google.cn will go dark sometime next month.