About five minutes ago, I posted a story at Search Engine Land named Did Dalai Lama Award Cause China To Send Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Search Traffic To Baidu? Danny and I wrote it together, because this seems to be a huge deal.

It seems like China is fed up with the U.S., so as a way to fight back, they redirected virtually all search traffic from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to Baidu, the Chinese based search engine.

We have reports from TechCrunch, Digital Marketing Blog and Google Blogoscoped Forums that all three engines, when used for searching, are being redirected to Baidu.

Danny felt it had to do with the Dalai Lama being given a US award. China Protests US Award for Dalai Lama from the AP says "The United States has "gravely undermined" relations with China by giving the Dalai Lama an award, the Chinese government said Thursday."

I don't have to explain how important the Chinese market, including search market, is to the U.S. economy. I wonder what else China has up their sleeves.

Note, right now this is all speculation. China has not yet confirmed taking these actions. But I doubt Baidu has the power to redirect traffic at the ISP level.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Google Blogoscoped Forums and Sphinn.

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