Privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo is now blocked in China. We noticed this over the weekend, and on Sunday DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg confirmed to Tech in Asia that the team has noticed the blockage in China:
@SirSteven @duckduckgo @jasonqng we did get blocked as far as we know
— Gabriel Weinberg (@yegg) September 21, 2014
Weinberg added that he has “no idea” when it happened exactly. We also cannot pinpoint an exact date, but it was accessible in China earlier in the summer. DuckDuckGo had been working fine in mainland China since its inception, aside from the occasional ‘connection reset’ experienced when accessing many overseas websites from within the country. But now the search engine is totally blocked in China. (Update 7 hours after publishing: the GreatFire index of blocked sites suggest that DuckDuckGo got whacked on September 4).
DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg confirmed that the search engine is now blocked in China.
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DuckDuckGo joins Google in being censored and blocked in the nation. Google, after years of being throttled by China’s Great Firewall since the web giant turned off its mainland China servers in 2010, was finally blocked totally in June this year.
Only foreign search engines that have Chinese servers, such as Bing and Yahoo, work in China. But, operating under Chinese media laws, both Bing and Yahoo heavily censor their search results – in contrast to Google and DuckDuckGo.
Chinese search engines Baidu and Qihoo dominate the market.
Editing by Paul Bischoff
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