SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) – Google Inc. is feeling increased pressure from Chinese authorities as a result of its ad-hoc method of delivering unfiltered search results to mainland China, the company disclosed late Monday.

The company has been informed by Chinese authorities that its method of redirecting visitors from Google.cn to Hong Kong-based Google.com.hk, where unfiltered results are available, is “unacceptable,” Google (GOOG 458.84, -13.24, -2.81%) Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wrote in an online posting.

In addition, Google has been told that if it continues to operate in this way, Drummond said, it will not be able to renew its Internet content-provider license in China.

In response, Google announced that it has begun yet another approach, by starting to take visitors to a Google.cn site that provides an explicit option to link to the unfiltered Hong Kong site, rather than redirecting them automatically.

“Over the next few days, we’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all our Chinese users to our new landing page,” Google said in its statement, adding that it has resubmitted an ICP license-renewal application in China “based on this approach.”

The Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant announced in January that in response to sophisticated cyber-attacks that originated in China, it would cease voluntarily filtering out politically sensitive topics from its search service there. See related story.

In March, the company said it would begin redirecting visitors from Google.cn to the Hong Kong site to provide unfiltered results, a solution that many analysts and experts called tenuous.

Alan Davidson, Google’s director of government relations and public policy, said during a congressional hearing that month that the company hoped it could keep its automatic redirect to the Hong Kong site, which was seeing only intermittent government filtering, in place indefinitely.

“One of the better-case scenarios is that people in China are able to access our uncensored search engine based in Hong Kong,” Davidson commented then. “A bad-case scenario is that that service is blocked outright.”

John Letzing is a MarketWatch reporter based in San Francisco.

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