I've just got a humble smartphone with no fancy apps on a hotel wifi network in Canton, China.
My search engine of choice seems to be unavailable for some reason. How can I search the web in English without it?
baidu.com (a major Chinese search engine and also encyclopaedia) seems to work, but it's localised to Chinese.
I tried search engining, but the main result I got involved a website that uses baidu, and then the translate service of a certain unavailable search engine.
I usually end up using Bing if it's something I have to search for in English, even though it's really primitive and low quality in every way compared to Google.
If it's something I think I might be able to search in Chinese then I use Baidu. It's best to have a Chinese speaking friend handy though for when I get stuck.
You can use Baidu to search in English, but the interface is always only in Chinese and it's actually not very good at even searching English. (It is often better at searching Chinese than Google though.)
If you do get VPN, don't expect it to "just work" all the time. I had varying problems with VPN in different places in China.
From my personal experience (Jun 2016) Yahoo works better than Bing in China, although both indeed work and not blocked as stated by @hippietrail above.
Bing also has a nice online translator: http://www.bing.com/translator where you can feed the sites like Baidu. This is also available in China.
Wikipedia suggests that Bing.com is freely available in China, however this service which tests availability of websites in China sometimes shows me a green and at times a red light (right now red, matching your experience). Interestingly it gives a green light for Google right now, even though that is blocked according to Wiki. The result is similar for other big search engines.
There is a thread on Quora but the quintessence is to get a VPN. For that also see some older posts on here:
Alternatively, I found a list of meta search engines and none of them seems to be blocked from what I can tell over here
The quintessence is, that the Great Firewall does not necessarily consistently block all content, it suffices that it makes use of foreign websites painstaking enough to reconsider them.
Since you do not have a VPN, my recommendation is to hang in there for hopefully not too long, and keep trying services that you have already given up on at a later time, with sometimes surprisingly positive results. Anecdotally, even Facebook sometimes works for a few moments.
I recommend Bing Global. Incidentally I'm a Chinese , I know the pain you are suffering.
Try http://SearchEngineChina.com. It allows you to fetch Google Search Results in China. You can also select different languages to display the results.
