(CNN) Google had come with new tool which tell the user that which country had suppressed or requested for the censorship. The tool called Google Transparency, the online report shows that internet censorship around the world is increasing over time, and not always in the countries you'd expect, said Dorothy Chou, a Google policy analyst who worked on the project.
"The threat to internet freedom has actually been growing over the past few years," she said, noting that the United States generally bucks that trend by supporting open online communication.
Google Transparency includes an interactive map where users can see how many requests countries have made for Google to block or remove content.
This online tool also lets users explore internet up-time in specific countries for specific Google-owned websites.
Countries that would be thought less likely to filter the internet also try, Chou said.
Thailand, for example, asked Google to remove YouTube videos that showed the Thai king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, with feet near his head. A national law bans such offensive representations, Chou said, and Google agreed not to show such videos within Thailand, although they are still available elsewhere in the world.
Google said it hopes Transparency will shed light on how the internet differs from country to country, and on the efforts of nations to block internet content.
"What we're trying to do is give a picture of what's accessible around the world -- are our services accessible?" she said. "What we believe is more information is better for users." The data only applies to sites that Google owns, which include Blogger, YouTube, AdWords, Google Maps and others.
Google's tool is the first of its kind published by a private-sector group, Chou said. The site Herdict.org, a project of a group at Harvard University, aims to crowd source similar information by asking users around the world to post when specific internet services go down. Herdict -- a combination of the words "herd" and "verdict" -- maps the user-submitted data on its website.
A group called the OpenNet Initiative also has published a world map showing to what degrees countries censor social and political speech online.
Herdict's blog praises Google for posting global information about internet censorship, but it said the project is difficult to navigate.
Between January and June of this year, the United States asked Google for information about its users 4,287 times and filed 128 requests asking Google to remove information from its websites, according to the data.
Google said it complied with nearly 83 percent of U.S. requests that it remove information from its search engine or other sites.
Chou said Google complies with the laws of the countries in which it operates, and declined to list a specific example of a censorship request in the United States. She said, however, that a request might be for Google to remove content from a blog that violates U.S. copyright law.
Google also sends information about online content it is asked to remove to a website called ChillingEffects.org, she said.
Because the data are not collected in the same way for all countries, and because Google is based in the United States, it is difficult to compare those numbers to the censorship requests of other countries, Chou said.
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