Google appears to have dropped censorship in China

NBC News in Beijing tried to search for sensitive topics, such as "Xinjiang independence," "Tibet Information Network," “Tank Man,” “June 4,” and  "Tiananmen Square massacre," normally blocked in China, MSNBC reported.

Each time, simply clicking on the links to the results enabled the sites to be accessed without any difficulty.

"It does seem that the filters are not fully working," said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of danwei.org, a Beijing-based Web site that tracks media and the internet in China.

"But no one knows exactly what's going [on]," he said.

Google denied the change in their Chinese search service.

"We have not changed our operations in China," Google spokesman Scott Rubin said by phone from Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

However, CEO Eric Schmidt heralded last week something would happen soon.

Another Google spokesman said the change may have resulted from alterations made by the Chinese government.


[Via MSNBC]