It appears that Google and China are playing a game of brinkmanship–and Google’s losing.

After continued threats from China, Google apparent still hasn’t done enough to prevent porn from being easily found at Google.com. In response, China pulled the plug on access to the search engine.

Attempts to access Google.com and Gmail from different computers in Beijing started failing after 9pm local time, but the websites could be accessed through proxy servers – normally a sign that a website is being blocked by internet censors.

Whether the "outage" was a warning shot across Google’s bow or not, we don’t really know.

Cui Jin, spokeswoman for Google China, confirmed that access was cut but would not speculate if it was linked to the government order on cleaning up its act.

Seeing the hard numbers of how social media search queries on sites like Facebook has gained in popularity is not a surprise to most. After all, many think that real time search could be the wave of the future and could eventually provide the revenue model that a social medium like Twitter needs to be a real player.

What was a bit of a shock, however, in the comScore numbers reported by Search Engine Watch was the slight step backwards that Google took by recording 2% less search queries in May vs. April of this year.

Taking a look at the big chart full of numbers, at least from a traditional search perspective Google can take some solace in that they were not alone. The slip that occurred was still smaller than their biggest competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo.