China has blocked the word "Egypt" from online searches for comments on protests in the North African nation.

Keyword searches generated no results about Egypt on Monday on microblogs such as the Twitter-like sina.com, which has more than 50 million users, Agence-France Presse reported.

Meanwhile, similar searches on major web portals returned an error message saying the topic was not allowed under "relevant laws," the news agency said.

Reuters reported that Chinese websites were restricting comments on the protests against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's regime.

In Egypt itself, most internet and text messaging services remained blocked as they had for days.