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

Atlavista

[orangesquid]

It's too bad that they've blocked atlavista, but those Chinese citizens need not dispair about altavista ;)

let's see

[Vodak]

I guess that if you can't search it doesn't exist.

Search no webpage see no webpages know no webpages

Re:let's see

[flonker]

Oh no! They've blocked it for the rest of the world too!

Now they've gone too far.

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.

tightening the grip

[rehannan]

China seems to be black-listing just about every damn site on the net. Wouldn't it be easier to just white-list [the equivalent of] china.gov?

Re:The only way to get people to use AltaVista

[GuyMannDude]

I, like many "EXTREME" searchers, ...

What the hell is an extreme searcher? Do you quick look up something on your laptop just before jumping out of an airplane? Or maybe you do a quick search after performing a knarly skateboard stunt?

Totally rad, Dude!

GMD

China: The Evil Empire

[GuyMannDude]

The more they tighten their grip, the more web sites will slip through their fingers.

GMD

use google by email instead

[YaRness]

Seen here, or just try it yourself

yet another reason why we need a p2p search system

[aminorex]

the subj. really makes my entire point.

a fully distributed content-addressible web
infrastructure is the best way to resolve this
problem once and for all. linked with a
good distributed proxy infrastructure, or better yet, a fully anonymized transport it will take herculean efforts
to do this kind of information-suppression.

Sell-out

[jacoberrol]

Yahoo is one of the 130 major web portals that recently signed a voluntary pledge not to post information that would jeopardise state security and disrupt social stability in China.

Ahem. Bullshit. This makes Yahoo sound like a hero. It should be re-worded as: Yahoo capitulates to Chinese government in order to retain 90 million potential eye-balls.

This is why I trust Google's results over Yahoo's. Google takes the moral high-ground and refuses to censor the Internet. I don't have to worry that my search results will be skewed by somebody's agenda.

Government Laziness and Popular Effort

[The_Guv'na]

gogle.com is still accessible. If I were in charge at google, I'd just make that domain point the site rather than redirect. You know, just to piss the chinese authorities off, 'til they find it and block it. AFAIK google own a few other mis-spellings of their domain.

What I'd like to know is what sort of backlash there is in china against The Great Firewall? I very much doubt that this blocking goes un-noticed, yet I have never heard anything about any sort of resistance to it in china or any other country in the media, although it almost certainly does exist.

Naturally, a quick search on you-know-what brings up some interesting links.

I'd also like to add that I believe hacktivism to be, at least in this case, piss-all use, and that graffiti on government buldings is the way to get the message to the intellectual proles. And also the way to torture and execution.

Have a nice day.
Ali

Too bad they aren't like Microsoft...

[malakai]

... and have the balls to do what is right:

But what is "normal" in China can be altered under duress. When Chinese authorities ordered Microsoft to surrender its software's underlying source codes--the keys to encryption--as the price of doing business there, Microsoft chose to fight, spearheading an unprecedented Beijing-based coalition of American, Japanese, and European Chambers of Commerce. Faced with being left behind technologically, the Chinese authorities dropped their demands. Theoretically, China's desire to be part of the Internet should have given the capitalists who wired it similar leverage. Instead, the leverage all seems to have remained with the government, as Western companies fell all over themselves bidding for its favor. AOL, Netscape Communications, and Sun Microsystems all helped disseminate government propaganda by backing the China Internet Corporation, an arm of the state-run Xinhua news agency.

from: http://www.fofg.org/news/who_lost_china_internet.h tml
great article.

-malakai

Re:The only way to get people to use AltaVista

[Debillitatus]

That was as strong as it gets.

Important Update: Rerouting

[nocent]

This information is about Google but may well apply also to Altavista in the future.

It seems it's not just blocking access to the sites but re-routing requests to Google to search engines of the government's choice. See Reuters article

Some relevant bits:
Some users in Beijing and Shanghai were redirected to Peking University's no-frills search site Tianwang, the little known cj888.com and the American-invested Baidu.com, among others. Users in Guangzhou were rerouted to the local portal 21cn.com.

So, perhaps the real goal here is to divert traffic to local search engines and increase their market share?