China blocks privacy-conscious search engine DuckDuckGo

It appears that the Chinese government has blacklisted privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo. The Chinese government previously blocked access to Google for its nationals. It is not known why the website has been blocked.

The blockade was spotted by a China-based journalist from the Tech in Asia website. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg confirms that, to his knowledge, a blockade has indeed been introduced. Earlier this summer, DuckDuckGo was still accessible in China.

DuckDuckGo has probably gained a lot of users since last week. Apple made it possible in iOS 8, released Wednesday, to use the privacy-focused search engine as the default search engine in the Safari browser. It is unknown whether the possible influx of users has anything to do with the blockade.

The Chinese government often blocks foreign websites if they refuse to cooperate with Chinese government censorship. For example, Chinese people were denied access to Google earlier this summer, and Wikipedia is also inaccessible in the land of the dragon. Bing and Yahoo are, but those companies have servers in China and censor their search results.