Google disruption in China seen as government crackdown

BEIJING — When Yi Ran is working on new designs for his Yinshen Clothing company, he often turns to Google to search for pictures to use as inspiration. “The results are more complete and objective than Chinese search services,” the 30-year-old from Guangzhou said.

But for the past two weeks, when Yi has tried to call up the U.S. search engine, it’s been unavailable — as have a wide variety of other Google services, including Gmail, Google Books, Google Scholar and even country-specific search pages like Google.de, the company’s German home page.