When China said they would stop citizen’s from using Google’s uncensored search results the search giant began operating their servers out of Hong Kong, an area of China that doesn’t have the same censorship laws as the rest of the country, now Google is taking a whole new approach to provide Chinese citizens with uncensored search results.
In a post today Google said China would not allow the Google.cn redirection to occur, so they are providing a landing page at Google.com.hk which then lets users click on a link to head to the uncensored China search page.
Here’s the Google blog post:
“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.”
For some reason I have a feeling this isn’t going to make the Chinese government much more happy about securing their own censorship policies, however Google will continue to take baby steps until they find a solution that allows them to continue with their own mission of delivering uncensored results, while playing at least semi-nice with the Chinese government.
What do you think of the newest move by Google and what steps would you take if you were in charge of Google China?
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