Competition that was redirected this way included Microsoft Live.com (because results are showing on search.live.com), Yahoo.com (results are on search.yahoo.com), and Google Blog search (blogsearch.google.cn). Even some more exotic pages, like www.search.ibm.com.cn, were suffering from this hijacking. According to a source which I will keep anonymous here, the problem started around 1 am Beijing time on Wednesday. I don’t know if the problem persists, your comments are welcome.

The Baidu homepage

Chinese DNS servers are under government control though it is unclear whether this was a conscious attempt to give more exposure to Baidu, or if it was a misconfiguration of some sort. Baidu.cn is certainly a “government-friendly” search engine (and Google’s #1 enemy in China, even though Google once had a stake in the company). Then again, to some degree so are others like Google.cn or Yahoo.cn, as they also receive certain orders from Beijing. E.g. Google displays an ICP – Internet Content Provider – number badge on its Chinese frontpage, and its local partner Tianya shows Chinese police avatars on their pages every now and then. But there may well be degrees of gov’t-friendliness among these Chinese search competitors.

In other, perhaps related news, Google YouTube released a Hong Kong version (as it’s not Mainland China it’s forced into much less restrictions)… and now there are reports coming in that YouTube is too blocked in China.

[Thanks 徐杰, Keith Chan, A., Ken Wong and Manoj Nahar!]

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The word “may” only relates to the percentage; Reuters states that Google has already confirmed some sort of deal.  And as Bill Bishop writes on the billsdue blog, “Google appears to be using Tianya’s registration system, which gives them at least two benefits,” the first of which is “seamless access to Tianya’s 20m+ registered users.”

That could be a huge help in the battle against Baidu (China’s leading search provider).  From more of a PR angle, Bishop lists the second advantage as the “deniability of evil when the Chinese government requests user info, since technically the info is held not by Google but by Tianya.”  There’s no telling if Google will actually act in this manner, but it is possible.

In any event, the new Q&A site appears to be doing well; from what I can see, most questions are getting viewed and answered numerous times.  Also, this deal doesn’t come as much of a shock – we saw an “answers”-type service launch in Russia not too long ago, and just last week, Kai-Fu Lee, the president of Google China, expressed a desire to acquire and invest in more companies.

Lee spoke about one or two acquisitions, and as many as four or five investments, however, so stay on the lookout for more Google-related news from China.