Reports have surfaced that China is rerouting search traffic from foreign search engines run by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to China-based Baidu.com.

According to some online users in China, search sites have been rerouted to Baidu. Also, TechCrunch weblog reported that Chinese traffic to Google's blog search engine was being redirected to Baidu. TechCrunch later published another article stressing an identical situation was observed with the other 2 search giants.

Vivian Wong, a manager at CB Richard Ellis in Shanghai, said visits to the 3 major search engines showed Baidu's home page instead. Beijing-based David Feng wrote in his weblog Thursday that he was able to gain access to both Google and Yahoo, but not Microsoft's Live.com or altavista, a Yahoo-owned search engine.

But Ori Elraviv, chief exec of Dragon Ports, a mobile applications developer in Beijing, said he had no problems getting through to the sites. "I find such an occurrence really hard to believe. Blocking a service is one thing; diverting it to a competitor is a completely different story."

World of workcraft Google has, though, confirmed the traffic-rerouting occurrence. Google sent similar statements to The Register and search engine blogger Danny Sullivan, stating: "While this is clearly unfortunate, we've seen this happen before and are confident that service will be restored to our users in the very near future."

China has been involved in previous claims of Internet censorship but the government has denied the allegations.

You smell something fishy?