You might have caught the story earlier in the week that Google had been banned in China. Well, we all know that such governmental bans are doomed to failure and, sure enough, New Scientist claims that there's a way round it.
Trouble is, it's still going to be a little inconvenient for our Chinese friends. Their answer is a Google parody site called elgooG, where everything (like the name) is reversed. So, you type in "golbenilno" and you get links to this site - although the results are aligned to the right of the page, and the type is backwards. Better than nothing, I suppose, although only just.
New Scientist points out, in the last paragraph, that Google allows others to use its API so sites can call on Google's vast database without holding the information themselves. (The little Google powered search box on this page is not quite the same: I suspect that because the web form below sends the request to google.com, and because the results then appear on a page served up by google.com, it would be blocked in China.)
But New Scientist couldn't find any sites actually hosting a Google search, which makes you think they couldn't have looked very hard (as this is how Google makes much of its money). There's google.yahoo.com, for a start, which is not blocked in China. And the Google powered BBC search is served up by bbc.co.uk. According to this test of China's firewall, the BBC site is available to surfers in China (it's news.bbc.co.uk that is blocked, famously).
Neither site has the cached page feature that, we suspect, is what upsets the Chinese authorities most. And the BBC's results are slightly rearranged from the Google original. But both picks have got to be rather better bets than elgooG.
