Ask HN: Why Duckduckgo is faster than Google in China?

1 pointjstoja1 comment

I'm living in China and I saw that: 1. Duckduckgo is WAY FASTER than Google (when you can access it) 2. Duckduckgo is not censored (at all) 3. You can still find on ddg the content of why Google is blocked

Does anybody has an idea ?

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The government wanted people to use Baidu (and other chinese alternatives) over Google. This follows the trend of other bans (youtube/twitter/facebook) which all have chinese alternatives.

Google was by far the most popular search engine at the time they made the decision. Other lesser search engines are mostly fine.

My guess is that it was proving too controversial to outright block Google because of it's popularity at the time, so they decided to make it appear low quality instead.

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