I can't reach Google from China

'The operation timed out when attempting to contact www.google.com'

[bathrobe]

I'm located in China. Today it is impossible to get either www.google.com or www.google.co.jp (Japanese Google).

Is this affecting anyone else? Or is it only China? (or only me?)

[Knowles]

bathrobe welcome to WebmasterWorld!

I am on google.com right now. Are you able to access other sites ok? Obviously you can contact WebmasterWorld but what about other sites?

[bathrobe]

Lycos ... Ok
Goo (Japanese search engine) ... Ok
Webmaster World ... Ok
My web site host ... Ok
Quotes from the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ... Ok

Google ... Not ok

I've tried Google through two providers, one here in Hainan, one in Beijing. Same result.

[Knowles]

Thats odd I have been using it all night, but I am in the US so maybe thats making the difference. Have you tried any of the other google sites? IE co.uk .ie or an of them?

[bathrobe]

I'm crossing my fingers this is a temporary thing. If the Chinese government were to ban access to Google (as they do for geocities), then life in China is going to be very bleak.

You may not realise it, but Google is not just a search engine, it's a research tool. Just a small example: I can go to Chinese Google, type in the English words 'Invisible Man', and find the title that the Chinese book or film was released under. I can also do searches on words or phrases that don't appear in Chinese dictionaries.

What would I do without Google?

Anyway, I'll keep you posted.

[bathrobe]

Was also unable to access www.google.co.uk

[rfgdxm1]

China bothers to block Geocities??!

[bathrobe]

I've never had trouble accessing pornographic websites in China (on the odd occasion that I've cared to look).

[bathrobe]

I should keep up to date with things.

www.google.com is still inaccessible.

www2.google.com and www3.google.com are OK!

What is going on?

[Woz]

Hi Bathrobe,

I had similar problems accessing certain site when I was living in China. I am of the opinion they "turn off" a whole network/IP or perhaps even a C Class if there is a report of a no-no site in the vicinity just to be sure. Perhaps G has been swept up with a very large brush.

What city are you in? I am wondering if there may be different restrictions in different areas. I was in Shenzhen.

Being on the net in China is a funny experience, you never know who may be listening.

Onya
Woz

[nutsandbolts]

http://code.law.harvard.edu/filtering/list.html

has a big list of sites currently blocked by China. Google is in there.

(Note: I haven't linked directly to the site on purpose as it's quite a long list and it may look a bit "spammy" to the GoogleBot ;)

[GoogleGuy]

Thanks for mentioning this, bathrobe. Are there any other Chinese users here? I'd be curious to hear what other people are seeing.

[Alby]

bathrobe, have you tried to use something like anonymiser.com? I don't know if that would work, but it might.

[bathrobe]

Google is still inaccessible this morning (Sunday morning here).

Strangely, Yahoo is OK, so you can still see Google results!

I haven't tried anonymizer recently. It used to work, and then for some reason it stopped working (blocked, maybe?) and I haven't tried it since.

Thanks for the address for the blocked sites list, nutsandbolts. I could access the site, but according to Mozilla the 'document contained no data' and IE said that the 'Attempt to load 'Accessing URL: [code.law.harv..(...)..html'...] failed.'

As far as I know, this is the first time that Google has been blocked in China. Although I have noticed temporary hitches in access in the past few weeks (months?), I assumed that Google was getting too popular and becoming overloaded.

[googlefun]

I'm from china, too. The same thing happen to me. I can only use a proxy to access www.google.com.

[kch333]

if you can read Chinese, you can see:
http://www2.baidu.com/cgi-bin/forum/topic_show.cgi?id=1788&pg=1&age=0&bpg=1#4813

These guys are discussing the influence in the future, the baidu.com would get some advantage from it.

The reason why www.google.com is not availabe but www2 ok, or http://216.239.35.101/ is ok? I tell everybody the same story happened here. You can buy the magazine "TIME""NEWSWEEK" in the 5 star hotel, that means, the government don't let "MOST" persons use www.google.com to know about "falungong", a branch of Buddism.

maybe...

kch333

[unauthorised]

As mentioned in the previous post in Aug 31, google.com is clearly blocked the Chinese government. www.google.com, or www2.google.com, or any other domain names with goole in it.
www(2).google.com is blocked based on IP address (that is 216.239.33.101,216.239.33.100), and news.google.com, groups.google.com and etc are blocked based on the domain, (I can ping this domain ip, but can connect to HTTP port). Obviously here in China, ISPs have installed very advanced large-scale firewall that can process HTTP context (more than just network connection block).
I have even tested with other websites, dailynews.yahoo.com, wired.com, I can view these pages without any trouble when the content are "ok". But when there are some reports that related to chinese government, then the page will suddenly drop the connection (http connection lost), I have also tried to use telnet to do the test.
google is a very important tool for me and many other chinese people, if the government to block everything that they consider "harmful". It's really pathetic for us who are willing to make our life better with our energy and brain.

Please tell the world, that we need google, or yahoo or something else that's useful to do the research. We don't care about politics, but please help us to reach google!

A webmaster that's been pushed out of google and maybe the world.

[Woz]

Hi unauthorised,

I understand your frustrations, been there myself, literally.

But there is always more than one way to skin a cat, or in this case, access the mighty G.

Have you tried AOL search, or EarthLink search, or any of the mutlitudenous sites that Google supplies? These may not be blocked - yet.

Onya
Woz

[Woz]

Folks, whilst I agree with your concerns, please lets have a little consideration for our members in China with our comments. We don't know who may be listening to our comments if you understand my meaning...

Onya
Woz

[kookoo]

give me a new URL,I can't get it from china

[Brett_Tabke]

Ya, lets leave the politics out of it. Anyone found a simple technical solution? Possibly going to Netscape, AOL, or Mindspring?

http://www.onlinepolicy.org/research/ospa/yahoo.shtml

[inwaaaytoodeep]

Well I guess we could all get a little paranoid about this. But have you tried using a different Dialup account? perhaps your ISP's DNS went down the toilet? and that's the reason why it can't be found.

!

[cminblues]

I've written a Perl/C prog that retrieve, each time it's runned, real-time, approximately 15 not-forwarding-IP proxies.

Unfortunately, it's a command-line linux/unix tool.

But if needed, I may put this online somewhere, so it can be used also with any browser.

Let me know.

[Brett_Tabke]

What is still not clear to me, is if this is Google doing the blocking (washington post story on Yahoo [washingtonpost.com]) or an action on the part of the Chinese govt? Appears to be the later?

[Woz]

Yahoo agreed to voluntary editing and removal of part of the content, not the whole site.

Here we have a situation where the whole Google site is unaccessable. And if the mighty G were doing this then I think they are clever enough to ensure that www1 and www2 would also not be available, which is not the case.

Seems pretty clear to me.

Onya
Woz

[nutsandbolts]

Seems as if the BBC [news.bbc.co.uk] is interested in this story now...

[Woz]

So is Reuters Asia [asia.reuters.com].

This is going to get big.

Onya
Woz

[kch333]

all reports forbiddend , we cannot see the report about it.

kch333

[Macguru]

The Globe and Mail [globeandmail.com] grabbed this from Reuters.

[bobriggs]

I see that unauthorized (msg 18) was quoted in the BBC story:

Please tell the world, that we need Google, or Yahoo or something else that's useful to do the research. We don't care about politics, but please help us to reach Google