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

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.