Google have went ahead and censored their search results in China. Many people believe this is against Google’s long term mission and future goals: to index and provide the worlds information. Google has never wanted to censor its results and as such has never before entered the chinese search market, being a blogger and a firm believer in free speech myself I feel the decision to censor results is somewhat wrong and could hurt Google in the future.

However Google have made up their mind and are creating Google.cn with self-censored search results for the Chinese market. From the Google Blog

Google users in China today struggle with a service that, to be blunt, isn’t very good. Google.com appears to be down around 10% of the time. Even when users can reach it, the website is slow, and sometimes produces results that when clicked on, stall out the user’s browser. Our Google News service is never available; Google Images is accessible only half the time.

This problem could only be resolved by creating a local presence, and this week we did so, by launching Google.cn, our website for the People’s Republic of China.

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