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There should be nothing new. Google services are blocked for several years. But not every service is blocked in the same way.

Google+ and Docs is wholly blocked a long time ago. Google.com is blocked intermittently. Gmail and Maps are usually OK, but not very fluent these several days.

GFW is a mysterious monolithic and complex system. No outsider knows the rules and mechanisms.

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I agree. I just want to add that I think they have a "degrade" mode designed more to be annoying than to block access. I know people here in Shanghai who hate Google products because they're so "slow", "unreliable", etc. Of course, they're perfect through a VPN.

Actually I have switched to Bing as my default search engine for a while. For English, Bing is good enough but very bad for Chinese.

I use DDG, as when the Chinese results far from your desire, you can easily add some key words like g! to invoke google's engine for help.

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