SAN FRANCISCO — China's government gave little indication Thursday it's willing to loosen its control over Internet search results, pushing Google closer to the brink of closing up shop and leaving the country.

In the government's first official statement since Google issued its ultimatum two days earlier, a Chinese official endorsed the country's current rules governing Internet content.

"China's Internet is open," said Jiang Yu, a foreign ministry spokeswoman. "China welcomes international Internet enterprises to conduct business in China according to law."

Google is still hoping it can persuade the Chinese government to agree to changes that would enable its China-based search engine to show uncensored search results. "We are optimists," Google spokesman Scott Rubin said.

If a compromise isn't worked out within the next few weeks, the company intends to shut down its search engine at Google.cn and pull out of China completely. Rubin said Google hasn't set a deadline for breaking the impasse.

Google has been in touch with the Chinese government to alert officials about its plans, but Rubin didn't know whether the two sides have scheduled additional meetings yet.

Images from the 1989 Tiananmen Square cropped up in Google.cn's search results Thursday, leading some Web surfers to conclude Google had begun to defy the government's rules requiring censorship of many politically sensitive issues. But Rubin said Google.cn is still censoring its results to comply with China's law and protect its employees there.

Google is prepared to abandon the Internet's biggest market because of computer-hacking attacks that pried into the e-mail accounts of human-rights activists protesting the Chinese government's policies.

The assault also hit at least 20 other publicly traded companies, according to Google. IDefense, the security arm of VeriSign, issued a report saying the attacks hit at least 34 companies, including Google.

In a separate report Thursday, computer security expert McAfee said its investigation determined the hackers exploited a flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft confirmed the weakness in a Thursday advisory and said the security hole can be closed by setting the Internet zone security to "high."