Google on Tuesday announced it would stop technical support for a social networking and question-and-answer service run by Chinese internet forum Tianya.

"In the future, Google and Tianya will separately operate two different question-and-answer services. To the users who enjoyed these products, we apologise," Google said in a Chinese-language blog post.

The search engine company previously operated both services, but Tianya said in late March that it might take full control of the services after Google ran into censorship problems with the Chinese government.

Google, which now has a link on its China site that users must click to visit its Hong Kong site, said it will launch its own question-and-answer service on the Hong Kong site for mainland China users, shortly.

Google also announced on the blog that it would shut down Rebang (or hot list) website and Shenghuo (or life page) as they failed to interest users.