The Chinese government has put pressure on Google to remove the ‘Google Suggest’ section from its search results pages because some of the results are unsavoury. Google Suggest offers similar searches to a search query made in Google, and some of the search suggestions can lead to suggestive results.
For example, a search for the Hilton Hotels heiress ‘Paris Hilton’ revealed the following suggestions from Google:
As you can see, some of the suggested searches would lead to some unsavoury content, which is what the Chinese government wants to block.
Google has faced problems in China for many years, with the government insisting on censorship within Google before they allowed Google into China.
Google has freely admitted that China has requested that pornography be removed from its index for searches made within China. A Google spokesperson said:
We are undertaking a thorough review of our service and taking all necessary steps to fix any problems with our results. This has been a substantial engineering effort, and we believe we have addressed the large majority of the problem results.
