New Delhi, July 5: The Supreme Court today pulled up search engines Google, Yahoo and Microsoft for failing to block advertisements related to sex-determination tests and asked them to "get out of the market" if they couldn't check them.

"You have to do something about this. This has become a social evil. You have to abide by the law. You can't say that you are not technically equipped. If you say you are, 'get out of the market'," Justice Mishra, who was heading a bench, told lawyers who were appearing for the search engines.

The court was dealing with a 2008 public interest plea filed by one Sabu Mathew George who had complained that some foreign websites were soliciting couples to undergo sex-determination tests.

Such tests are banned in India under the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994.

The search engines had contended that they did not have the technical know-how to block such pop-up ads, irking the bench that also included Justice R. Banumathi.

The court asked solicitor general Ranjit Kumar to convene a meeting on behalf of the Union government with the intermediaries - the search engines - to hammer out a technical solution to check the ads from surfacing on websites browsed in India. It then posted the matter for further hearing to July 25.

Senior advocate C.A. Sundaram, who appeared for Google, submitted that it was not technologically feasible to block all key words. It was contended that the search engine had made every effort to block such ads but it was not possible to totally stop them from being aired on the websites.

The senior counsel, however, said if the government and the petitioner provided them with a list of such ads and the websites that hosted them, Google would do all it could to block them.

Senior advocate K.V. Vishwanathan, who appeared for Microsoft, said the searches were powered by "complex algorithms, and the intermediary cannot control them technologically".

But the arguments failed to convince the court, which sought answers from the solicitor general on how the Centre intended to tackle the menace.

"There is a violation of the law. They need to be controlled, they are violating the law of the country," Kumar admitted.

Earlier, Sanjay Parikh, the counsel for the petitioner, had criticised the intermediaries, saying they were merely trying to escape their liability. He complained that none of the search engines had made any effort since 2008 to block the offending sites.