"As more and more illegal and unhealthy information spread through blogs and search engines, we will take effective measures to put the BBS (bulletin board service), blogs and search engines under control," Xinhua news agency quoted Cai Wu, a government spokesman as saying.

China was taking steps to make registration mandatory on millions of blog sites and BBSs, or sites where Internet users can converse online, Cai said.

According to a report by Tsinghua University, quoted by Xinhua, China currently has up to 36.8 million blog sites, a figure that could grow to 60 million by the end of the year.

The number of search engine users had reached 97 million, or about 87 percent of all Internet users, the report said.

"We will speed up the technology development to safeguard the network management and do more research on the Internet security issues triggered by the new technologies in blogs and search engines," the report quoted Wang Xudong, Minister of Information Industry, as saying.

China has for years been waging an online battle to censor the Internet of pornographic and violent content, while also stifling political and religious material that it believes could spark social unrest.

Two years ago all Chinese Web portals were required to register with the government, while they also signed on to government issued regulations to self-police their sites for "unhealthy content".

Rules at the time also required all Chinese Internet cafes to register web surfers and not allow them to download or upload any content onto or from personal devices.

Human and media rights groups say China's leaders are tightening their control over the Internet and traditional press amid increasing social unrest and regularly jail journalists and Internet commentators who post anti-government material on the Web.

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