// Home / News

Untimely "bug" turns Google site Chinese

By Hani Megerisi

Posted on 24 Mar 2010 at 17:20

Google claims to have been hit by a curiously timed "bug" that translated part of its corporate website into Chinese.

In the same week as Google announced it was pulling out of China, the biographies of Google executives were this morning displayed in Chinese, according to The Guardian.

Google vs China

Who has more to lose?

Google denies its site has been attacked. “This is not a hack but rather a bug affecting the language displayed to some users, and we are working to fix it soon,” Google said in an official statement.

“People got excited this morning when it was in Chinese but it’s in other languages too,” a spokesman for the firm told PC Pro. Indeed, when we looked at the site this afternoon it appeared in both Italian and Spanish.

Earlier this week, Google pulled its Chinese search engine, redirecting users to its Hong Kong site. This followed months of tensions between the firm and China over censoring search results.

Subscribe to PC Pro magazine. We'll give you 3 issues for £1 plus a free gift - click here

From around the web

User comments

Spanish

I thought it was just me, but earlier I was looking at the Google Blog and some of the webmaster tools and one of the pages translated into Spanish !!!

By baileytech on 24 Mar 2010