Following up on last week’s report that China is blocking the uncensored Google.com, but leaving the censored Google.cn reachable — an anonymous BoingBoing reader in China says,
Search results from google.com from outside China are already being messed with. For 2 years, I was able to search for a certain website to see early adopters of internationalized domain names (IDNs). Now, the search doesn’t work from google.com, only from google.cn. Similar results from other China owned IDN TLDs. Also, before you ask, yes, I tried both kinds of period characters from both sites, the RFC 3490 says that both should yeild same result, but they don’t. Either period still yields no results from google.com.
Link to screengrab.
Also: Internet censorship researcher Michelle Levesque has an interesting post on her blog about Google’s decision to filter Google.cn search results in cooperation with China’s communist government. Link (Thanks, Scott Ruderman)
Reader comment: Dave says,
You posted that ” Update: reports China is blocking Google.com, censored Google.cn becoming only option” It’s news to me, I’ve been using google.com without interuption. Sometimes there are localized blackouts (something that works in Beijing might not work in Shanghai — but usually I only hear about it if it’s my website). I get the same results searching for “site:.cn” and “site.[China in Chinese]” from both Google.cn and google.com — which is to say nothing for the latter one. Of course I also get nothing from google.ca when I search for “site:.canada”
Reader comment: myrick says,
Thanks for keeping track of things, but China is NOT redirecting traffic to the censored Google and neither is Mountain View. The uncensored Chinese-language site is fully reachable. On the Peking Duck thread you linked to Kevin has admitted his error. Link.