By Jacqui Cheng
June 25, 2009 12:15 PM CT

Google found that its search engine and services were temporarily blocked in China this week while Microsoft's Bing began filtering for sensitive topics and China's Ministry of Health announced that sexual health sites will soon be banned. China has been in the news more than usual lately as it continues to go after popular search engines for supposedly disseminating porn.

This week, users of Google's services experienced unexplained access problems in China. Meanwhile, sexual health sites are on the verge of being blocked, and Microsoft's Bing has agreed to censor its Chinese search results. Google has been under fire in China lately for not doing enough to block porn from entering the country over the Internet. Late last week, the government began blocking access to certain Google results in an attempt to remedy this problem, even as Google pledged to step up its efforts to fight porn in China.

China is impatient, however, and Google is not perfect, leading to this week's temporary blocks of Google's services. Users began reporting that they were unable to access Google.com, Google.cn, or a number of Google's services (Gmail, Google Docs, etc.) on Wednesday evening. As of Thursday morning, this was apparently still the case—Google acknowledged the outage in a statement sent to the AFP, saying that the company was "investigating the matter."

As of this writing, however, it appears as if access has been restored to Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou, at least according to our checks through WebSitePulse's Great Firewall test. On a related note, China's Ministry of Health has announced that even sexual health websites will soon be banned within China as part of the country's overall war against porn, and that only medical experts will be able to have access.