I had the same problem with Yahoo!Mail some days ago, and I realised it was a DNS issue : so far, I was using OpenDNS (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220), but I came back to the original Codetel DNS (196.3.81.5 and 196.3.81.132) and it all works fine now...
If you're looking for something specific, try to find a search engine that specifically looks for that specific thing ... :laugh:
I sometimes use dogpile or a search engine that gets a conglomerate result from all others - a few more .. ask.com, mama.com, the new livesearch from Microsoft...
For anybody with problems or anyone that needs to check email you can use a proxy to fool the google nameservers into directing you to a server in another country. Setup is a little complex but if anybody still needs this help let me know and I'll explain.
Please do, wight-boy - it's coming up to 12 hours now, and I just had a call from a friend, also in SD, who's had exactly the same problem, with Yahoo as well as Gmail/Google.