Google to chinese searchers: your search interruptions are not our fault

Google announced on their blog that they have noticed an increase in complaints from searchers in mainland China. The issues they are reporting is that Google.com and searchers are not coming up, as if Google.com is down.

So Google investigated their servers and operations and noticed no issues with anything on Google’s side. So they ran some tests and were able to confirm that many queries lead to Google acting as if Google is unreachable. They produced a video showing this in action, where one query would work but then another query would lead to a response of either “This webpage is not available” or “The connection was reset.” After that message, Google would not load for a full minute and a half. Here is the video:

Google had their engineer run hundreds of thousands of tests and produced a warning screen to preempt these webpage not available errors in order to give the Google user a more pleasant experience. The message looks like the picture above and you can try it out yourself over here. The message reads:

We’ve observed that searching for [query] in mainland China may temporarily break your connection to Google. This interruption is outside Google’s control.

The message links to this page which explains the phenomenon but doesn’t outright blame China for the issue. Google does clearly state, “these disruptions are outside Google’s control and unrelated to Google’s technology.”

Google has a long sensitive relationship with China, see our stories below for more on that.

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Related Topics: Google & China | Google: Outside US | Google: Web Search | Legal: Censorship | Legal: Regulation

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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