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I wish they gave an option to turn this off or at least they would disable it in China.

Google has a lot of connectivity issues to China. Having the link be redirected makes using Google a lot more unbearable as the connection hangs like 50% of the time.

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It's not just China. It's a general problem with any high-latency link (for example satellite or mobile broadband.) These redirects easily added 2-3 seconds to the latency of retrieving a page when I was working over satellites at a remote retreat center. And that was as you say on a good day. Hanging connections were very common, I often had to do a hard refresh on various Google Apps to get them to stop the spinning wheel of death.

If you're using Google Chrome 15 or earlier, then what you're seeing is a problem with SPDY that was fixed in Chrome 16. But it's considered the unstable version, so the auto-updater doesn't go that far.

I'm on Chrome 16 and it happens in other browsers.

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