SAN FRANCISCO/SHANGHAI — Google Inc said changes in China’s censorship practices were responsible for blocked search queries on Tuesday, reversing its previous contention that the disruption was the result of a technical glitch on its part.
Google also said that search traffic in China now appears to be back to normal, following reports of broad disruption to Internet searches earlier on Tuesday.
Just three hours after initially commenting on the cause of recent disruptions to its search service in China, Google offered a new explanation on Tuesday.
Google said in an updated statement that changes it made to its search code, which it had initially cited as the cause of blocked searches in China, had been made a week ago, and not in the past 24 hours, as Google had first said.
“So whatever happened today to block Google.com.hk must have been as a result of a change in the great firewall,” Google said in an emailed statement, referring to China’s technology for filtering Internet content.
Separately, it also said its mobile services in China were partly blocked on Sunday and Monday.
The news comes with Google’s Chinese search service already in the headlines due to a censorship dispute with Beijing.
Analysts and China experts have been on the lookout for signs that Beijing might clamp down on Google and restrict its services, following harsh official comments in reaction to Google’s new approach to offering Internet search in China.
The company shut its mainland Chinese portal Google.cn last week and rerouted searches to its Hong Kong site in order to offer uncensored search results. But for most mainland Chinese, search results for sensitive terms like “Tiananmen” are still blocked by the Chinese government.
Users in China began on Tuesday to report erratic results on Google.com.hk, saying even searches for non-sensitive terms like “hello” returned blank pages. At other times, sensitive searches returned a normal result, showing links to pages that are then blocked by China’s Internet filters.
Earlier on Tuesday, Google said that due to a change on its site, “gs-rfai” started to appear in the URLs of Google searches globally in the last 24 hours.
“Because this parameter contained the letters rfa the great firewall was associating these searches with Radio Free Asia, a service that has been inaccessible in China for a long time — hence the blockage,” a Google spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. “We are currently looking at how to resolve this issue.” Google said the problem affected “lots of” users.
Radio Free Asia is a pro-democracy, pro-human rights media channel that China’s censors have blocked. It was not immediately clear why Google made the changes to the URLs.
The updated Google statement said that search traffic to China was now back to normal, even though Google had not made any changes on its end.
“We will continue to monitor what is going on, but for the time being this issue seems to be resolved,” Google said in the statement.
Google on March 22 said it would pull its Chinese-language search services out of China, citing also a hacking attack late in 2009 that it said originated from the country.
Google — the world’s No. 1 Internet search provider and No. 2 in China behind local search powerhouse Baidu Inc — has said it intends to retain some business operations in China, including research and development staff and a sales team.
But analysts have said that the Chinese government could make life difficult for Google.
According to Google, its mobile services were partly blocked in China for two days.
On a website showing the accessibility of Google’s services in China, the company listed mobile as “partially blocked” on Sunday and Monday. Prior to Sunday, there were no issues with mobile services in China, according to the site — http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl-en.
Some users in Shanghai on Tuesday reported no problems with searching through Google’s mobile service, indicating that the outages are intermittent.
Other mobile users have had problems ever since Google stopped censoring search results in China earlier this month.
A Google spokeswoman would not speculate on the cause for the mobile outages.
Google shares closed US$4.26 higher, or 0.8%, at US$566.71 on Nasdaq.
© Thomson Reuters 2010
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