This is totally badass. Instead of a technical solution to a technical problem, Google is going with a political solution to a political problem. There are a t

This is totally badass. Instead of a technical solution to a technical problem, Google is going with a political solution to a political problem. There are a ton of technical ways Google could silently defend against this particular form of censorship (someone suggested reencoding the offending characters), thus starting a cat-and-mouse game with the censors. But that would (1) be an "act of war" in terms of blatantly attempting to pierce China's Great Firewall, giving China an incentive just to block Google wholesale; (2) not inform people that their searches were being censored; and (3) be a lot of work, with no likelihood that they could ever keep searches uncensored for very long. By playing totally dumb, and saying "huh, we've noticed some kind of technical problem with your search, try phrasing it a different way," Google (1) takes no overt action to evade the censorship; yet (2) lets everyone know it's happening and subtly encourages them to try to evade it themselves; and (3) sets up a system that sees any censorship as damage and routes around it, which hopefully is an approach that's relatively difficult to counter without blocking the whole site, and is how the internet ought to work anyway. In conclusion: from the little I know of what's going on here, this is a seriously clever move. Interested to see how China responds.