Mediaboss Marketing

In its latest effort to squash efforts by Beijing to restrict online content, Google (GOOG) began warning people in mainland China on Thursday that certain keywords in searches may trigger the governments Internet blocks and break their connection.

Google, which has long fought against Internet censorship in China, launched this week a new feature on its search engine there that informs users which keywords are likely to trigger censorship blocks and cause a system outage for more than a minute.

- Google

The tech titan said it started reviewing the system after complaints by users on mainland China of spotty service. After taking a long, hard look at its system, it found no internal problems, but noticed specific keywords, such as the character Jiang, which is a popular surname that also means river, can cause connection problems.

The new mechanism includes a drop-down menu that appears under the search bar when problematic keywords are typed. The warning informs users that going through with the search may temporarily break your connection to Google, and ensures that that the interruption is outside Googles control.

Users can choose to either search anyway or edit search terms.

By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China, Google said in its official blog on Thursday. Of course, if users want to press ahead with their original queries they can carry on.

Google appointed a team of engineers in the U.S. to review the 350,000 most popular search queries in China. They looked at multiple signals to identify disruptive queries, and then identified specific terms at the root of the issue.

Weve observed that many of the terms triggering error messages are simple everyday Chinese characters, which can have different meanings in different contexts, Google said.

For example, Jiang, the surname and word for river, not only causes problems on its own in a search, but will break connectivity if also searched with Lijian, the name of a city in the Yunnan Province, or the Jinjiang Star hotel chain.

Originally posted here:
Google Wages Keyword Battle Over China's Censorship