The announcement deftly sidestepped any allusion to censorship, saying only that users had been frustrated by error messages and disconnections and that Google engineers had “taken a long, hard look at our systems and have not found any problems.”

“However, after digging into user reports, we’ve noticed that these interruptions are closely correlated with searches for a particular subset of terms,” it stated. “So starting today we’ll notify users in mainland China when they enter a keyword that may cause connection issues.”…

Users of Chinese search services like the popular Baidu, on the other hand, can search for “jiang” without difficulty, but only because government censors have already sanitized the results of a search to delete any sensitive Web pages. The result is a list of pages that gives no indication of censorship.