Although Google doesn't succumb to the pressures exerted by the US government to provide the authorities with data reflecting the places visited by Internet users, when it comes to the Chinese gold mine, the censorship sword waged by the communist leaders has succeeded to get the search engine on its knees.

The struggle between the online giant and the red giant has ended in favor of the latter, Google agreeing to the rules imposed by the Chinese giant in order to roll out google.cn.

Google officials quoted by AP say that it's better to provide the Chinese users with some information than none at all. Therefore, the Chinese who search something on Google.cn will obtain filtered results which match the Beijing's ideological concepts. Among these concepts, there is also pornography, which is censored in other countries as well.

"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. 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," Andrew McLaughlin, senior policy counsel, told the Associated Press.

However, the search engine will inform the Chinese user every time it blocks some results, the same way it does in France and Germany for Nazi paraphernalia.

Currently, the Chinese arsenal provided by the Mountain View, California, company includes the main search page, the one for images and the one for news.

Google avoids for now the e-mail and blogging services, fearing the government will request confidential data about the users.