Google Says Goodbye To Google.cn – Sort Of

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Let’s just say that relations between the Chinese government and Google aren’t too good at the moment. With all the cyber attacks allegedly coming from China and all the censorship China is imposing on its people and Google, they just don’t seem to be getting on too well. Google has been eager to try and convince the Chinese government to stop censoring it’s search results to the people of mainland China, but the government just wouldn’t budge.

However, in a cunning move, Google as always have found a way around it all. As of today, the Google.cn site no longer exsits and instead users will be redirected to Google.com.hk instead. The Hong Kong version of its site. An ” Entirely Legal” workaround to the situation.

Earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected toGoogle.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong.

Finally, mainland China can have unfiltered search results again. Google have also offered their services in traditional Chinese and have even made a page that shows which services are being blocked or allowed from the Google Hong Kong site to Mainland China.

As of March 21st 2010 about half of the services are available including web and images. However, some services like YouTube are still being blocked and I have a funny feeling that more services will be blocked when China realizes how Google has tricked them.

Google made an announcement on their blog in a post entitled “A new approach to China”. They say that users may experience a slot slowdown in their service while the switch is taking place until they get things sorted out. There also hoping that the Chinese government respects their decision this time.

We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China

So we will see how long this lasts before China gets angry again and ruins everything on Google. How long do you reckon they can get away with it?

Let us know in the comments

Source:

Google Blog

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