China Not Stealing Google's Traffic

Last week, a shocking piece of news appeared on the web as the folks from TechCrunch reported that the Chinese ISPs redirect all the users' searches on Baidu's search engine. Although it was previously rumored that China steals only the Google Blogsearch users, some other publications then reported that the authorities redirected all the search engines' consumers to Baidu's official page. Today, Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service, wrote that several Chinese users informed him that Google's, Yahoo's and Microsoft's search engines were always available and no consumer is redirected to Baidu's search technology. Moreover, Google Blogsearch is not blocked as TechCrunch reported and is available to all the users.

"However, several Internet users-- four in Beijing and two in Shanghai-- reported on Friday morning that search engines operated by Google, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., including Google Blogsearch, one of the sites reportedly most affected, were accessible. Attempts to reach these sites had not been redirected to Baidu, they said," the source mentioned above wrote in the article.

China has always been one of the countries which tried to limit the content available to the users, the Internet being described as a method to obtain way too many details on certain topics. Moreover, some unlucky guys were sent to prison due to offensive material posted on the web which criticized government's actions. For example, a Chinese resident who was identified with the help of Yahoo was convicted by the authorities because he tried to promote some secret Chinese material which shouldn't be distributed on the Internet.

Recently, the Chinese authorities implemented two virtual cops that should appear on the country's top portals in order to inform the users every time they are about to access infringing content. In addition, a lot of websites were blocked in the entire country due to the offensive content appearing on them.