Thaindian News

SAN FRANCISCO (BNO NEWS) — Google announced on Monday afternoon that it has stopped censoring the search services in China and its now re-directing the Chinese web traffic to Google Hong Kong.

“We stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn,” Google said in an statement.

Google said the company “intend to continue R&D work in China and also to maintain a sales presence there,” and that size of the Chinese sales team will be partially dependent on the ability of mainland Chinese users to access Google.com.hk.

“We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.”

According to Google, more than 20 U.S. companies had been the victims of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China. A Google investigation uncovered evidence to suggest that the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties.

These attacks combined with attempts to further limit free speech on the web in China including the persistent blocking of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger had led the Internet giant to conclude that it could “no longer continue censoring our results on Google.cn.”