The decision, Google said, was prompted by its discovery that a China-originated attack let malicious hackers steal Google intellectual property and partially break into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

At the time, human rights and free speech activists applauded the decision, and held Google up as an example for other Internet companies to follow.

However, almost a month after its strongly-worded statement, Google hasn't followed through on its plan and continues censoring its search results in China.

Asked for an update on the matter, a Google spokesman said on Friday via e-mail that the company has nothing new to add beyond its initial blog posting on Jan. 12 and the brief comments CEO Eric Schmidt made afterwards.

In the blog post, Google said the decision to stop censoring search results in China had been made. "We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn," David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer.