As Google’s Internet Content Provider (ICP) license is up for renewal on June 30 in China, Google now has a new approach to handle Google.cn visitors.
Since Google’s January announcement this year that Google was no longer willing to censor results on Google.cn, Google had automatically redirected everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese.
Google has started taking a small percentage of Google.cn users to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk (as shown in the above image). It’s a bit deceptive as it looks like a normal Google search box which in fact is an image that links to Google.com.hk.
Google has announced that over the next few days they’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all their Chinese users to the new landing page.
