Silicon.com: AltaVista hits out at China ban

Since the weekend, surfers in China have been unable to access AltaVista. Instead they have been redirected to a variety of domestic search engines which have been approved by the communist government.

Kevin Eyres, general manager, AltaVista International, issued a statement today which said: "Free access to information is the cornerstone of our mission to provide access to information to the global community.

"We were very concerned to learn that AltaVista.com and AltaVista.co.uk were inaccessible in China. We have been working on alternative ways to serve our Chinese users, with additional URLs not in the AltaVista.com domain, including www.raging.com.

"At this point it appears that other AltaVista country sites, such as altavista.ca, altavista.ie, and altavista.de continue to remain accessible in China."

Rival search engine Google has also been affected by the ban (see www.silicon.com/a55482 for more) but the Chinese government's plans to block access to its search service have come up against fierce opposition from ingenious techies.

A number of mirror sites have picked up the Google baton and are endeavouring to work around the 'Great Firewall of China'.

While it is impossible for the mirror sites to copy the search prowess of Google, the effort must be commended. One silicon.com reader tipped us off about a site which mirrors Google in far more literal terms than you might expect. Check out www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog .