Tencent’s WeChat has mounted a glitch that allowed a few of its content material to be searchable by exterior search engines like google and yahoo, the proprietor of China’s hottest messaging app mentioned on Friday, elevating questions over regulators’ newest try to crackdown on the web sector.
A few of WeChat’s content material, together with articles on its public accounts web page, was briefly searchable in the previous couple of days on Alphabet-owned Google and Microsoft’s Bing, however not on China’s dominant search engine Baidu, Reuters checks confirmed.
The change had prompted hypothesis that Tencent was heeding a name by Chinese language authorities for its tech giants to tear down “walled gardens” within the nation’s our on-line world which has come amid a large ranging crackdown on the sector.
“Attributable to latest technological upgrades, the official accounts’ robots protocol had loopholes, which prompted the exterior crawlers to scrape a part of the official accounts’ content material,” Tencent mentioned in a press release in Chinese language.
“The loopholes have since been mounted.”
Google, Microsoft, and Baidu didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. Google isn’t out there in China.
The power to search out WeChat content material on Google and Bing was initially raised by customers on developer boards. China’s web sector has been lengthy dominated by a handful of know-how giants who’ve traditionally blocked rivals’ hyperlinks in addition to their search crawlers, a follow is also known as ‘walled gardens’.
In latest months, this follow has been focused by Chinese language authorities as a part of a sweeping regulatory crackdown.
Final month, China’s Ministry of Trade and Data Expertise (MIIT) ordered firms to cease blocking hyperlinks, which they mentioned has affected customers’ expertise and broken shopper rights.
The MIIT has additionally been learning plans and conducting analysis to make WeChat content material out there on exterior search engines like google and yahoo, in response to an individual with direct data.
MIIT didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
Some customers on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform expressed dismay over Tencent’s feedback.
“This needs to be an vital try of making an open web house, how are you going to name it a bug,” mentioned one consumer.
© Thomson Reuters 2021
