暢遊防火長城 感受地道的谷歌風情 Googling behind the China GFW

Google has redirected traffic of Google.cn to Google.com.hk. What is the "new" Googling experience of Chinese citizens? Let us follow some simple steps to get that feeling.

The approach is to access Google.cn via some proxy servers in mainland.

1. Pick a China proxy at this URL and configure the browser's proxy settings.
http://www.xroxy.com/proxylist.php

2. Check your IP address by accessing http://whatismyip.net.
Check http://robtex.com to verify your IP address's location (it should belong to China)

3. Browse http://www.google.cn.
You should be redirected to http://www.google.com.hk

4. Google the term "達賴喇嘛" (Dalai Lama). You should be able to find a large list of sites.

5. But when you click on the links presented by Google, the browser connection was terminated. You are out of service for 1-2 minutes.

6. After a few minutes, the connection should be resumed. You should be able to search "達賴喇嘛" again.

7. Now try to Google "六四屠殺" (June 4th Massacre) or "六四屠城". Guess what? You cannot even get a list of URLs. Your browser connection was terminated again.

8. Conclusion
(a) Although Google.cn no longer filter content, the GFW of China still function. It will block access based on a blacklist of keywords. "六四屠殺" is on this blacklist.

(b) Some keywords are more critical than the others.
For 達賴喇嘛, the blocking is more lenient than "六四屠殺" because some mainland China newspaper are talking about 達賴喇嘛, criticizing him and other countries.

(c) If you had recorded the traffic log, you should have found that you were flooded with RST (reset) packets when you click on URL of blocked site, or you entered a word in the blacklist. This is a usual GFW behaviour.