Chinese sites apologise for porn

China's most popular search engine has apologised for providing links to websites portraying pornographic content following a government-led initiative to clean up the web.

The 'porn purge', which began in earnest this week, is intended to remove “vulgar” content from China's internet.

The owners of search engine Baidu said they felt "deeply guilty" for any "negative effects" such sites had on China's 250 million surfers.

"Besides deleting the obscene content and links concerned, we have improved our regulatory system," Baidu said in a notice on its website.

"We apologise to the netizens at large for the negative impacts we brought upon the society," it added.

Baidu was just one of 19 websites criticised by Chinese authorities for carrying vulgar or pornographic content.

Google was also singled out as the government launched a one-month campaign to clean up China's internet content.

www.baidu.com