If you are in China right now, try doing a search on Google News for “China” (using the international site at Google.com, not Google.cn). Here’s our result from Shanghai:
A little strange for a country where the Olympics are about to finish. The absence of China from news searches does not appear to be a Net Nanny phenomenon or at least it does not resemble the usual blocking and filtering.
However, doing a search for “China” from outside of China returns normal results (see this screenshot, captured at the same time as the above). A search for Beijing is similarly content-free (most of the time – normal results get returned occasionally).
Is the Net Nanny going crazy? Has Google itself been hacked? Is it a protest by the guy who has been tracking down deleted documents about the ages of Chinese gymnasts?
Or has Google, like Danwei, realized that the news in China will only get interesting again after the Olympics are over?