China To Filter Online Gambling from Search

Chinese officials have already asked Google to apply a pornography filter to its Chinese language search service. Online gambling sites may be next.

A spokesperson at Google Inc said that Google would be "taking all necessary steps" to comply with Chinese requests following a meeting with Chinese Government Officials last week regarding porn websites on Google Chinese language search.

Chinese officials have for some time complained about the content available on Google search, describing it as "disseminating large amounts of pornographic and vulgar information." Perhaps not quite grasping the search concept, their position on the issue suggests they believe the porn websites are endorsed and operated by Google rather than simply a part of the web that Google has crawled and indexed.

Nevertheless, they are resolute in their mission to stamp out the availbility of pornography to Chinese residents, shutting down as many as 2,000 porn sites hosted on servers in China already this year. They have also announced that all PCs sold in China will soon require pre-installed porn filtering software.

Some analysts are saying that another category of website the Chinese have in their cross hairs is gambling. The main targets of the Green Dam-Youth Escort software to be pre-installed on PCs are pornography, online gambling and other sites deemed harmful to society.

Given the notorious ineffectiveness of filters, it may not be long before Chinese officials are making the trip to Mountain View to remove all gambling content from their Chinese search.