Chinese firewall randomly disrupting Google service?

Some friends and I have noticed that occasionally our Google queries just die and we can't use Google for about 30 seconds, whereas other sites (including Bing and Baidu) still work fine. If we refresh the Google query 30 seconds to a minute later, it goes through without a hitch. I've found no pattern to the disruption - appears random. My suspicion is Google is just having their service degraded so that they are less reliable than their competitors. Does anyone else have information on this?