Google is announcing that it's going to place a flag on contentious search terms for users in mainland China. Mountain View's Alan Eustace euphemistically described how some searches break a connection to the service, leading to users being frozen out for around a minute each time. He theatrically added that the company has checked its servers several times and found no error, so whatever issue causes these outages must be external. Whenever a term is typed that is likely to cause an "outage," the error message in the picture above will appear, with a suggestion to search for something else, or use Pinyin to search for a term where contentious keywords appear inside otherwise natural searches.

Continue reading Google to flag 'censored' searches for Chinese users (video)

Google to flag 'censored' searches for Chinese users (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jun 2012 10:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.