China’s pressurising of Google is in the words of Qin Gang, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, because "We have found that the English version of Google.com spread lots of pornographic, lewd and vulgar content, seriously violating China's laws."

This situation is not unprecedented. The US search giant has capitulated before regarding self-censorship in China, and seems likely to do so again. It suspended its "Suggest" function in China and scrambled together a press announcement that it was working to extricate itself from the tight corner into which China has pushed it.

The move is also seen be linked to China’s insistence that all new computers sold in China after 1 July must have installed the so-called Green Dam filtering software, purportedly to filter out pornography, although several international media have reported that the software can also filter other types of politically sensitive content.

Google’s bargaining power is almost non-existent. It trails far behind local rival Baidu, which accounts for a little over 60 per cent of the Chinese search market, with Google claiming around 28 per cent. The disruption to its services this week followed claims by the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre that pornographic images could still be found through the Google China web site, despite earlier warnings in January and April.

But is Google being picked out for special treatment? We took a look around three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Baidu - and it seems the critical factor may be the "English-language version” of the sites as the foreign ministry spokesman observed above. While Baidu’s English-language search is clearly rigorously marshalled against English pornographic searches, both Google and Yahoo yield scores of search results for different pornographic search terms, all with the URL links clearly displayed. Although, mostly, these site links are blocked in China, a good proxy server is all that is required to solve that problem.

However, our mini experiment proved different when searching for pornographic material in other languages. Not au fait with multilingual pornographic search terms, we utilised online language dictionaries, which – naturally – we found using the three search sites. The results were startling. Again, Baidu is the best policed, but it is certainly not impregnable. By trawling around its search site, we found web images from Japan, Venezuela, Germany, Sweden and France that would all cause the air to turn blue in Zhongnanhai. 

All three sites dished up multiple search results for pornographic content searches in German, Spanish and Swedish. Again, though the majority of links were blocked, some were not and the search result URLs were clearly displayed on all three web search sites. Web site technology it seems is just as nimble and determined as those who seek to block its content from reaching a global audience.

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