June 23 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc., owner of the world’s most-popular Internet search service, temporarily suspended its “Suggest” search-prompt feature in China after being criticized by the government for providing links to pornography.

“Last Friday we temporarily disabled our ‘suggest’ functionality because we saw in fact there were some suggestions that appeared there that we did not feel were appropriate,” Marissa Mayer, vice president for Google’s search unit, told reporters today in Taipei.

Google last week had some of its search results blocked in China after being criticized for disseminating “vulgar content.” The U.S. said yesterday it’s “concerned” about the government there restricting access to the Internet after China issued a directive to ship “Green Dam-Youth Escort” Web-site filtering software with personal computers from next month.

Google Suggest is a function that automatically prompts Web users with completed words as they type in the search box, using algorithms and other data to predict the query they are most likely to want to see, according to the company’s Web site. Mayer didn’t say what type of content prompted the suspension and was unable to immediately say if it remains in effect.

Google dropped $1.67 to $405.68 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock has risen 32 percent this year.

Mountain View, California-based Google, with 27.8 percent of China’s paid-search market last year, trails Beijing-based Baidu Inc. 62.2 percent, according to research firm Analysys International.

Disputed Content

China’s office handling a crackdown on Internet pornography asked Google to remove links to disputed content, China’s official Xinhua news agency said June 19. English-language search results weren’t affected, the agency said.

Google engineers worked throughout the weekend “to refine and remove those suggestions more robustly,” with the company still evaluating the situation in China, Mayer said today.

A May 19 Chinese government directive stated all new PCs in the country should be shipped with Green Dam-Youth Escort, which monitors Web site access, from July 1. Business groups, including the Business Software Alliance, last week called on the government to review that requirement.

Computers loaded with Green Dam block sites with pornographic images and text as well as references to the Falun Gong spiritual organization, according to researchers at the University of Michigan. A June 17 update to the software failed to fix a vulnerability that could allow Web sites to take control of a computer, the researchers said.

Concern Access Restricted

“The U.S. is concerned about actions that seek to restrict access to the Internet as well as restrictions on the internationally recognized right to freedom of expression,” the U.S. Embassy in Beijing said in a statement yesterday. “We have asked the Chinese to engage in a dialogue on how to address these concerns,” it said.

China isn’t backing off from its requirement for PCs to have the controversial software from July 1, the official China Daily reported on its Web site last night, citing officials at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology it didn’t identify.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tim Culpan in Taipei at tculpan1@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 23, 2009 16:35 EDT