Google today caved in to pressure from the Chinese Government by launching a localised version of its website that self-censors information deemed "subversive" by the Communist authorities.

The company, whose motto is "Don’t be evil", has engineered its search facilities to restrict 110 million online users from searching for information on Tibetan independence or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

"In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy," the internet company said in a statement issued yesterday.

Google insiders acknowledge that it is likely to be criticised for its actions. The company's motivation is partly a need to restore its declining market share in China and partly a hope that providing a restricted service will help to unleash information in the country in the future.

Andrew McLaughlin, a senior policy lawyer for Google based in New York, said that the decision amounted to the lesser of two evils.

"While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information is more inconsistent with our mission," he said.

Google has accepted the inevitable backlash as the price of basing servers in mainland China which will allow faster searches, a crucial weapon in their battle for dominance with the Chinese search company Baidu.

Until now, Chinese surfers have been able to use Google.com but its results have been filtered by the "great firewall", a sophisticated system of internet monitoring that restricts access to a range of Western sites.

The new interface google.cn was launched at midnight and will be phased in across the country over the next few months. The original US-based google.com page will remain accessible but searches are likely to be auto-forwarded to the China-based servers.

The search terms blocked will include "the three t’s and the two c’s": references to Taiwanese or Tibetan independence, the Tiananmen massacre, cult-related searches, which may trigger reference to the banned Falun Gong organisation and information about Communist Party supremacy.

The company estimates that about 1,000 search categories are blocked by this filtering. No published list of barred terms exists, although the authorities are quick to complain if offending information becomes available.

In an attempt to be more transparent than its rivals, Google said that it would inform users that certain web pages had been removed from the list of results by order of the government.

In a spot survey comparing results between google.co.uk and google.cn, Times Online discovered large discrepancies for some sensitive searches.

The phrase "Tibet freedom" yielded 1,960,000 results through the UK search site, compared with 1,210,000 through google.cn. "Falun Gong" appears to have been one of the most heavily censored searches: in the UK, users are pointed to 1,780,000 pages; in China the search returns just 11,800 results - most of which appear to be government-sponsored reports condemning the cult.

As well as the sophisticated firewall and filters, China employs an army of at least 30,000 internet police who monitor the content of blogs, chatrooms and portals.

Google's complicity in censorship was severely criticised by human rights organisations. Reporters Sans Frontieres, the Paris-based press freedom watchdog, said that the launch of Google.cn represented a "black day" for free speech.

A spokesman said: "Freedom of expression isn’t a minor principle that can be pushed aside when dealing with a dictatorship. The internet in China is becoming more and more isolated from the outside world and freedom of expression there is shrinking.

"These firms’ lofty predictions about the future of a free and limitless internet conveniently hide their unacceptable moral errors."

The technology website Digital-Lifestyles.info asked: "Why would a company whose strap-line was Don't be Evil, do this? We feel this single action has marked the start of the end of the Google-fanatics relationship with the company."

The technology news website The Register concluded: "The decision would not seem so bad coming from another company but Google used to pride itself on the morality of its business strategy and devotion to free speech."

Google’s reputation is built on the integrity of its search results but its expansion has put that aspiration under pressure. The decision to censor some of its database results in China was the latest difficult decision that the search engine has had to make.

In Germany, searches on Nazi-related topics were already blocked; in America, copyright infringement was carefully policed. However, neither of those restrictions were as dramatic as the political censorship that Google accepted on its results in China.

So far, such censorship has not dented Google’s position as the world’s most popular search engine — although it was not clear whether users of its search engine were aware of the censorship that the company has imposed.

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