Chinese Google Search Block Supposedly a “Glitch”

Among many questions today, Google has responded that the blocked search results that users in China were experiencing was due to a glitch.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the glitch is related to the insertion of the string of letters “RFA”, standing for Radio Free Asia.  This result has long been censored by the Chinese government, but it is unknown how the results are being tagged with RFA at this time.

Editors at The Next Web have attempted searches that did not include the RFA text, and have found that the results are still not showing properly.  More to come as this story develops.

Search censoring in China has been primarily related to key words and phrases, but users are reporting that even innocuous searches (such as “happy” and “tree”) have been returning the page not found error.