lammert - 4:06 am on Feb 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

Having Lynx from the command level at a Texas server being redirected to Google China is an indication that headers or other client side information isn't used in this particular redirection. It seems therefore to be an IP based redirection.

The IP you are using to access the Google servers is in a data center and not on a home/office location. Google probably has the knowledge to determine that. It could use recent traffic it sent to that server IP/IP block/data center to make a best guess which country is targeted by the servers in that data center and redirect visitor traffic from that data center to one of their local search engines based on that best guess.

Probably just one of the other Google attempts to serve the visitor what he needs, rather than what he wants (cough, cough)