Hmmmm: Google's censorship filters in China suddenly disappear

For the final search, “Tiananmen Square massacre” was typed in, deliberately choosing the more controversial phrase instead of “Tiananmen Square incident.”

Once again, a long list of results appeared, detailing the military crackdown on protesters on 4 June 1989. The famous picture of a lone man blocking a line of tanks was among them.

Each time, simply clicking on the links to the results enabled the sites to be accessed without any difficulty.

“It does seem that the filters are not fully working,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of danwei.org, a Beijing-based Web site that tracks media and the internet in China.

“But no one knows exactly what’s going [on],” he said.