Results tagged “googleblock”

The crackdown on Google in China seems to have had little effect on its internet traffic. After dropping to 29th place on Friday, Google.cn returned to its original position of 21st place yesterday. While this is still much lower than Baidu (which has remained a stable position in the top 10), it's not bad for a site that's been consistently targeted by Chinese authorities - including campaigns complete with fallacious name-smearing interviews and fudged statistics, as well as a firewalling of several of its auxiliary services. Source: SCMP (paywalled)

Some enterprising cyber-Sherlock has used Google's Insight for Search service to discover that certain pornographic search terms experienced suspicious growth in the days prior to the the anti-Google CCTV reports.

So after a night without Google, it seems like the block is slowly rolling back and people are finally able to access their gmail around the country once again (though, at this moment, Shanghai users are still reporting problems). But why did it happen? According to the Guardian surmises that it was a "warning shot" over Google's "porn filters" (we quotemark that because it seems like Baidu, which has equally lax porn filters, is "safe"). Chinese netizens think it's to distract attention away from the Green Dam. If that's the truth, one can only wonder who's brain child this could've been: distract from controversy over web blocking by blocking the web? Good going.

It looks like sometime earlier tonight, almost all Google services stopped working in China. Now, at least Gmail's back up, but anything on the google.com domain is still inaccessable, though Google.cn and Google.uk are still able to be used. According to Herdict, Google works only one out of every six tries, and the blackout seems to have affected all parts of the country. Nobody's sure why the government has decided to hate on the G-ster, but it's got to be insane how many businesses and people this move affects.