WASHINGTON - US Internet search engines in China were being hijacked and directed to Chinese-owned Baidu, analysts said on Wednesday, speculating that this may be retaliation for the White House award to exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama.Analysts at Search Engine Roundtable, a website focusing on Internet search, said Chinese users trying to search on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft websites were being directed to the Chinese search engine. “It seems like China is fed up with the US, so as a way to fight back, they redirected virtually all search traffic from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to Baidu, the Chinese based search engine,” the analysts wrote.
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TechCrunch analyst Duncan Riley also cited the “hijacking” and added, “the redirects are more widespread than we first thought” and the sites including YouTube and Live.com were being blocked.
“There is some suggestion that the news of the Dalai Lama being awarded a prize by US President George W. Bush may be behind the move, but this is unable to be confirmed,” Riley said. “I’ve written previously on the possibility that China may use its firewall as an economic tool as opposed to a censorship tool alone, and although censorship may be partially behind today’s blanket ban of US search sites, the redirect to Baidu would indicate an economic motive.”
Digital Market Blog said it was able to confirm the hijacking as well. “In our office there’s about 30 machines ... If you do a search on Yahoo.com (any search) you get redirected to Baidu (as shown below) and shown Chinese results,” the analysts from the site wrote.