The Chinese government appears to be be ramping up its conflict with Google, according to reports. As of Tuesday, Internet users in China who attempted to conduct Google searches via both computers and mobile devices received error messages.
Google and China have been at odds for two months after the company said would pull its Chinese-language search services out of China. Google cited concerns over censorship and after a hacking attack late in 2009 that originated from China spurred it to rethink its China strategy.
Last week, Google attempted to circumvent Chinese government by redirecting tens of millions of users in China to its uncensored server in Hong Kong. The former British colony is semi-autonomous and has greater freedoms. Google does not censor searches there. According to the Wall Street Journal, even the most benign searches
On Tuesday however, Internet users in China attempting to conduct Google searches via Google's Hong Kong site received error messages. Even the most benign searches, such as the word "happy," returned error prompts stating that the results could not be opened, the Wall Street Journal reported.
"Users in some cities said they couldn't access Google.cn, the mainland Chinese Web address Google has long used, which since last week has automatically sent users to the Hong Kong site," stated the Wall Street Journal article. "Google's music search service also appeared to be inaccessible."
Google reported its mobile services have been partially blocked in China for two days, while searches on its Chinese-language site became erratic, about a week after the company shut its mainland Chinese portal and rerouted Web searches to a Hong Kong site.
On a Web site 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.
The leading Internet search provider has said it intends to retain some business operations in mainland China, including research and development staff and a sales team, but analysts have said that the Chinese government could make life difficult for Google.
"We can confirm that our status page indicates that mobile services are partially blocked from within mainland China," a Google spokeswoman told Reuters, but did not speculate on the cause for the outages.
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 by effectively shutting Google.cn and rerouting traffic to an uncensored site in Hong Kong.
Searches on that site from within mainland China have also been unstable, with some searches for normally non-sensitive terms returning blank pages.
At other times, even sensitive searches return a normal result, showing links to pages that are then blocked by China's Internet filters.
This report includes content from Reuters and the Wall Street Journal.
