Details Behind the China Search Engine Hijack

While it didn’t affect us here in Hong Kong, over the last few days several people in China reported having trouble accessing popular Western search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Attempts to access those sites would result in errors or redirects to Chinese search engine Baidu.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a professor of journalism here in Hong Kong, has reported many of the details on her blog:

What actually happened?? One Chinese friend offered this theory: “Just guess: the DNS hijacking was done by the ISP like China Telecom or Netcom either deliberately or accidentally. In some circumstances it leads to the Baidu page because it was set up as the default search engine.” Another wrote: “most of the geekers think it is [caused] by a upgrade of GFW.” (What he means there is that the ISP’s periodically “tweak” and “upgrade” the filtering mechanism that block various overseas websites. Sometimes when a tweak is in progress, strange things happen for brief periods of time.) It would appear that Danny Sullivan’s theory that the hijacking was a response to Bush’s meeting with the Dalai Lama may have been a bit prematurely formulated. But he is right to be on the defensive against those who now claim his entire report was false.

YouTube was also blocked this week.