Google and China have never played nice together, over the last several years China has threatened to shudder the world’s largest search engine over its refusal to fully censor search terms and Google has threatened to find ways around such censorship. Now Google is coming under fire once again thanks to a new tool meant to stop Chinese censorship interruptions.
Under Google’s current situation with China when a censored term is typed Google service is “interrupted” for up to 90 seconds at which point a user must wait before they can enter a new search term and entering a new tab will not allow for a search until service is restored.
Google’s new system will now display a drop-down menu under the search box which encourages users to try a different term to avoid service interruption. The message reads:
“We’ve observed that search for [X] in mainland China may temporarily break your connection to Google. This interruption is outside of Google’s control.”
Terms that can trigger the shutdown include “river” and “McDonald’s” among thousands of others.
When the yellow Google box appears users can try a new term without actually processing the search that causes their internet connection to be lost.
In an official blog post Google writers:
“We’ve said before that we want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services. Our hope is that these written notifications will help improve the search experience in mainland China.”
Here’s a video Google posted which shows the frustrations associated with performing censored searches through Google’s China platform:
[iframe src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/u2GHyVPoVms” width=”560? height=”315?]
