Sina and Sohu portals blocked

given three days to 'rectify' mistake of failing to filter keywords

[bill]

According to an article in the South China Morning Post June 20:

Beijing --- The search engines of two of the most popular Web portals on the mainland have been blocked in a sign of intensified internet censorship, with millions of users expected to be affected.

Sina [sina.com.cn] and Sohu [sohu.com] are the latest victims of Beijing's increasing control of the internet for having failed to filter certain keywords deemed politically harmful, industry sources in Beijing said yesterday.

"Chief editors of Web portals were summoned to the State Council Information Office in the morning and Sina and Sohu were ordered to shut down their search engines after they failed an on-the-spot censorship test," one of the sources said. The two portals had been given three days to "rectify their mistakes", the source said.

The Sina and Sohu search engines have been out of service since noon yesterday, with the search pages carrying a message that the sites were undergoing upgrades. Other services of the two portals were unaffected.

Supposedly the portals failed to filter keywords like 'Tibet' and others. I'm surprised there wasn't more media about this. The sites seem to be back in operation today.

[vincevincevince]

No comment here (due to terms of service). Would have a strongly worded comment otherwise.

[redstorm]

Supposedly the portals failed to filter keywords like 'Tibet' and others.

In my eyes, Political factor is fading right in China. I don't think the government will block them only by the mentioned factors. Maybe it's because they are not Self-Discipline?
Considering we have lots of internet users, i think it's necessary to regulate them for the sake of the public interests.

I'm surprised there wasn't more media about this. The sites seem to be back in operation today.

May i conclude that the reason is that these two SEs take only a small share? The general public cares little of them!

[edited by: tedster at 4:10 am (utc) on June 23, 2006]
[edit reason] fix formatting [/edit]

[bill]

You may be very right about that redstorm. ;)
These portals have been around just as long as Baidu if not longer. They are some of the earliest and most successful portals in the China market. It's odd when these older and more established sites get caught for something like this.

We haven't seen many statistics on Chinese language portal sites lately. We know who the leaders in search are. Does this transfer over to the pure portal arena?