Tencent Says ‘Loophole’ Allowed WeChat Searches on Google, Bing

Tencent’s WeChat has fastened a glitch that allowed a few of its content material to be searchable by exterior engines like google, the proprietor of China’s hottest messaging app mentioned on Friday, elevating questions over regulators’ newest try to crackdown on the web sector.

Some 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 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.

“Due to recent technological upgrades, the official accounts’ robots protocol had loopholes, which caused the external crawlers to scrape part of the official accounts’ content,” Tencent mentioned in a press release in Chinese.

“The loopholes have since been fixed.”

Google, Microsoft, and Baidu didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. Google is just not out there in China.

The potential to seek 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 expertise giants who’ve traditionally blocked rivals’ hyperlinks in addition to their search crawlers, a observe is sometimes called ‘walled gardens’.

In latest months, this observe has been focused by Chinese authorities as a part of a sweeping regulatory crackdown.

Last month, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) ordered firms to cease blocking hyperlinks, which they mentioned has affected customers’ expertise and broken shopper rights.

The MIIT has additionally been finding out plans and conducting analysis to make WeChat content material out there on exterior engines like google, in response to an individual with direct information.

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 should be an important attempt of creating an open internet space, how can you call it a bug,” mentioned one person.

© Thomson Reuters 2021