Google has drawn up detailed plans for the closure of its Chinese search engine and is now “99.9 per cent” certain to go ahead as talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking. 
 
 In a hardening of positions on both sides, the Chinese government also on Friday threw down a direct public challenge to the US search company, with a warning that it was not prepared to compromise on internet censorship to stop Google leaving. 
 
 The signs that Google was on the brink of closing Google.cn, its local search service in China, came two months after it promised to stop bowing to censorship there. But while a decision could be made very soon, the company is likely to take some time to follow through with the plan as it seeks an orderly closure and takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by the authorities, the person familiar with its position said. 
 
 Google is also seeking ways to keep its other operations in China going, although some executives fear that a backlash from the Chinese authorities could make it almost impossible to keep a presence in the country. 
 
 When the search giant first promised to end censorship in response to what it claimed were a series of cyber-attacks mounted from inside China, many China-watchers warned that its public defiance of Beijing would provoke a stern response. 
 
 On Friday, Li Yizhong, minister for industry and information technology, said: “If [Google] takes steps that violate Chinese laws, that would be unfriendly, that would be irresponsible, and they would have to bear the consequences.” 
 
 One person close to the search company, meanwhile, said that its senior executives remained “adamant” about ending the censorship. The company has also ruled out keeping the search service going by handing majority control, or even the entire business, to a local player, this person said. 
 
 Google’s executives have made it clear that they still hope to stay in the country, whatever the fate of Google.cn. “It’s very important to know we are not pulling out of China,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, told the Financial Times at the time. “We have a good business in China. This is about the censorship rules, not anything else.” 
 
 The company’s other operations, which pre-date the launch of Google.cn four years ago, include its research centre in Beijing and a sales force that sells advertising on the Chinese-language Google.com search service, based outside China, to advertisers inside the country. 
 
 Mr Li encouraged Google to continue its operations in the country. “[Google] has taken 30 per cent of the Chinese search market. 
 
 “If you don’t leave, China will welcome that, if you don’t leave, it will be beneficial for the development of the internet in China.” ||||| Web wide crawl with initial seedlist and crawler configuration from March 2011. This uses the new HQ software for distributed crawling by Kenji Nagahashi. 
 
 What?s in the data set: 
 
 
 
 Crawl start date: 09 March, 2011 
 
 Crawl end date: 23 December, 2011 
 
 Number of captures: 2,713,676,341 
 
 Number of unique URLs: 2,273,840,159 
 
 Number of hosts: 29,032,069 
 
 The seed list for this crawl was a list of Alexa?s top 1 million web sites, retrieved close to the crawl start date. We used Heritrix (3.1.1-SNAPSHOT) crawler software and respected robots.txt directives. The scope of the crawl was not limited except for a few manually excluded sites. 
 
 However this was a somewhat experimental crawl for us, as we were using newly minted software to feed URLs to the crawlers, and we know there were some operational issues with it. For example, in many cases we may not have crawled all of the embedded and linked objects in a page since the URLs for these resources were added into queues that quickly grew bigger than the intended size of the crawl (and therefore we never got to them). We also included repeated crawls of some Argentinian government sites, so looking at results by country will be somewhat skewed. 
 
 We have made many changes to how we do these wide crawls since this particular example, but we wanted to make the data available ?warts and all? for people to experiment with. We have also done some further analysis of the content. 
 
 If you would like access to this set of crawl data, please contact us at info at archive dot org and let us know who you are and what you?re hoping to do with it. We may not be able to say ?yes? to all requests, since we?re just figuring out whether this is a good idea, but everyone will be considered.
– Having lost its showdown with the Chinese government, Google is poised to close its Chinese search site, rather than continue to censor results. The company will likely take action within weeks, a source familiar with the situation tells the Wall Street Journal. When it does, China will prevent local news sites from using anything but official accounts of the move. Another source tells the Financial Times that it is “99.9%” certain that Google will pull out. On Friday a Chinese official warned that if Google stopped censoring results, “that would be unfriendly, that would be irresponsible, and they would have to bear the consequences.” Google is hoping to keep some of its other Chinese operations running. “We are not pulling out of China,” Eric Schmidt said recently. “This is about the censorship rules, not anything else.” But some executives fear the backlash from closing Google.cn will make that impossible.