It's no secret that Google and the People's Republic of China (PRC) have not exactly seen eye to eye on issues related to Internet transparency in the past, and that doesn't appear to be on the verge of changing any time soon.
Google has recently added a new feature to their Chinese search engine which will notify users when they've attempted to search for a potentially sensitive word. When a user within mainland China attempts to search for one of these sensitive terms using Google's search engine, Google now informs them that there may be a temporary disruption of their service that is out of their control.
The exact wording states that "We've observed that searching for [*] in mainland China may temporarily break your connection to Google. This interruption is outside Google's control." It then allows the user to search anyway, or refine their search.
Google's actions are the result of numerous complaints from Chinese users that their connections to Google were being hindered, slowed, and or broken completely at times, for no apparent reason. This led Google to conduct an investigation into their service, at which point they were assured that the issue was not arising on their end.
What they discovered, as reported by Google Senior Vice President Alan Eustace in a recent blog posting, was that after analyzing hundreds of thousands of search queries by Chinese users, there was a clear pattern of specific search terms resulting in disruptions of service. It is these search terms that Google now notifies their Chinese users of.
Of course the real elephant in the room here, which Google skillfully avoided directly addressing, is that the disruptions in service caused by these specific search terms are likely the result of censorship by the PRC, and this move effectively notifies Chinese users of this censorship.
This move is just the latest salvo in the long-running feud between Google and the PRC, one which has seen Google move their offices from mainland China to Hong Kong following a bitter dispute over censorship, and also seen Google's GooglePlus service get blocked in China.
