Google pledges to comb out porn results in China

By Xinhua Writer Yan Hao

BEIJING, June 20 -- Searching engine giant Google Inc. said

Saturday that it would take all necessary steps to clean up pornographic

searching results in its Chinese-language portal, Google.cn.

"We are undertaking a thorough review of our service and taking all

necessary steps to fix any problems with our results," a statement from Google's

headquarters in Silicon Valley in the United States said.

The statement given by John Pinette, communications director of

Asian-Pacific Region, confirmed that the company's representative in China had

met with government officials to discuss problems with the Google.cn service and

its serving of pornographic images and content based on foreign language

searches.

The statement came after the Chinese authorities criticized some of the

search results served up by Google violated the country's Internet regulations

and laws.

Xinhua acquired the statement after an e-mail request to Google on Friday.

Telephone calls to the company's Beijing office has not been answered since

Thursday.

The China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center (CIIRC) Thursday

"strongly condemned" Google's Chinese portal for providing links to pornography

and lewd information.

The national office for Internet pornography crackdown has started blocking

some Chinese-language search results and suspended its associated word-search

services since Friday from Google over concerns that these links contained

pornographic content.

The California-based Internet searching company had been warned twice for

providing those pornographic links by the CIIRC in the first four months this

year.

The statement said the thorough review was a "substantial engineering

effort" and the company ¡°has addressed the large majority of the problem

results".

Jessie Zhang, a staff with Google's PR agent in China, also provided a

similar statement Saturday afternoon, saying that it would continue to

communicate directly with Chinese government on its services in China and the

progress of the current problem's solving.

The company will make additional announcements, as necessary, the statement

said, adding that Google had been continually working to deal with pornographic

online content and material in China which could be harmful to children.

The national office for Internet pornography crackdown said further actions

would be taken depending on Google China's implementation of the orders.

China launched a major crackdown on Internet porn in January targeting

popular online portals and major search engines such as Google and Baidu, the

two major competitors in China's Internet searching market.

In the past month, 1,001 Web sites had been blocked by the authorities for

distributing porn and other lewd material and more than 4,000 web sites that

were shut down also had been investigated, according to the CIIRC.