China Blocks Another Search Engine

Mr Natural writes "The BBC are reporting that the great firewall of china has blocked a second seach engine, AtlaVista.com, only a week after google was blocked. Here is the article."

Comments

alternate interfaces

[eXtro]

There used to be a search tool called Archie for searching FTP sites. It was an interactive tool when I first started using it but later as the number of people on the net increased a lot of Archie sites resorted to email interfaces. Now email interfaces for search engines might become useful again, though for different reasons.

It wouldn't be hard for somebody to create an email interface to google or altavista, though there would be significant bandwidth costs associated with it. A query could return an HTML email containing the 50 highest rated sites. In the event sites are blocked alternate commands could even return a cached copy of a particular site.

An email interface would be more difficult to block since its easy to generate sites that only provide a transmit/store/forward interface to the real email server.