Gone GOOGLE

M.A's commentary:
The most frustrating thing is that Google's search engine is the best. Bing'ing just is lame. I know there are better search engines than Bing available but if they use your IP then the searches results are in Chinese and that is useless to me. 

Plus a lot of things run off of Google platforms so they don't work at all or hardly like they should. For example 
we have tablets that are almost all set up to run off of Google and Google Play Store. What really makes me mad is that I forgot to install Microsoft on a tablet before I left. So I actually can't get Microsoft (that I paid for) for my tablet because it is only in an Apple or Google app store. Microsoft has a site in Chinese but I don't want the Chinese version.

Indigo's commentary:
My heart kind of broke for my mother when she told me Google was blocked. I think I could handle not being able to use Google as a search engine, as she mentioned there are other searching sites available like Bing. But imagine not being able to use Google Chrome!!! I absolutely hate Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox because they run so slow, but if I was to be in China, those would be my only options. 

I can understand why the government blocks Google though, however unfortunate the situation is. Google is a one stop, total access to whatever information you want. So it is probably easier for the Chinese government to block Google rather than going through and blocking every little site for certain search words (they probably do that too). Restricting access of information from such an open site makes the internet control so much tighter in China through a single block.

The Washington Post claims that Google is censored because of the governments dissatisfaction with Gmail. Prior to my mother's move to China again, I had heard rumors that Google and China were at odds, but it shocks me that that Google went so far as to cease it operations in China and in retaliation the government blocked the whole site on principle. However I do give props to Google for standing up for its company wide belief in stopping censorship. Imagine how much business this has probably cost Google.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/12/29/not-satisfied-with-gmail-china-seems-to-be-blocking-google-search-too/