Google Warned Chinese Users Over Censor-Prone Searches

Although China having a huge history of not allowing foreign sites like Google, Facebook to get a spot in the country, while this time it is meant for Google to do so. Google through its blog post warned users in the country over censor-prone searches. The company started by saying that from the past couple of years, Google received a lot of feedback that Google Search from China can be inconsistent and unreliable. Users are regularly getting error messages like “This webpage is not available” or “The connection was reset.”

The company strictly stated that it had not found any problems, however these interruptions are closely correlated with searches for a particular subset of queries. The company starts notifying users when they enter a keyword that many result in connection issues. The search giant’s US engineer’s team reviewed the 350,000 most popular search queries in China identifying the multiple signals to identify the disruptive queries, and from there they identified specific terms at the root of the issue.

In able to restrain more and give users a solution further, company says users can refine their searches without the problem keywords. For example, instead of searching for [长江], they could search for [changjiang]—which also means Yangtze River, but is written using pinyin, the system used to transliterate Chinese characters into Latin script. This won’t cause a timeout, but will still generate search results related to the Yangtze River.