Several sites report today that Chinese ISPs are redirecting searches made on Google Blogsearch and other search engines to the Chinese search engine Baidu.

Some point to the fact that Baidu has a partnership with ISPs China Netcom and China Telecom to redirect all invalid (or blocked) traffic to Baidu.

(Others argue that the redirects are limited to forbidden terms.)

It seems that someone in the Chinese policy apparatus has decided that Google Blogsearch is too dangerous to be left to the masses. That makes sense, actually, as the blog search engine gives access to fresh news and less prominent sites that have not been marked and banned by Chinese censors.

However, blog search was apparently only the start. New reports indicate that searches made at Yahoo!, Live and YouTube are redirected.

Techcrunch argues that this censorship may be economically motivated as well as political, as the redirects benefit a Chinese owned company.

Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land has another theory. He believes that it is likely that China is upset with the US over the award Congress granted to the Dalai Lama and is retaliating by hurting US-based search engines. Hence this could be a protest as well as an attempt to stop Chinese readers from reading about the Tibetan spiritual leader.

Regardless, this stinks!

See also Pandia’s articles:

Reactions to Google’s censored search results in China (January 27 2006)
China’s search engine censorship continues (February 27 2005)
Google censors sites in China (September 26 2004)
Internet filtering in China (January 28 2006)