After continuous testing today, it seems that for the time being, China has banned the word "Facebook" from Google search. Search for "Google", "Gmail", and even "access blocked sites" were all able to be searched and sites were able to be accessed. However, anything containing the word "Facebook" got your search automatically timed out, and banned from Google search, even after cookie removal and DNS flush. Is this a temporary thing or is China pimping up it's Firewall yet again?
I was able to use Yahoo and Bing to search the terms, but a couple searches in a row also got me banned from these search engines. Again, the "no no" word was "Facebook"
Only time will tell.
I've kept up on lots of the VPN services that unblock sites in China, and even those are a bit shaky – it seems that what works in Guangdong doesn't necessarily work in Xinjiang. But that's another story.
At my job it's a totally different story. When I check my Gmail (or attempt to, per say) on the computer at the office, I get about a 5 percent success rate, if that counts for anything at all. All of the time I've got to use HTML mode, and most of the time I can't even get Google to search properly. They are using a Chinese version of Internet Explorer – may IE 6 or 7 I'm not sure. It's miserable. The good news is that I've got to check out Bing and Yahoo sometimes – an I've found out that my site is pretty much invisible on those search engines – bummer. It must be because they censor their search results, because a lot of the articles I've written over the years are also unavailable.