What happened?
On May 31, 2013 at 7am, we observed that searching for keywords that are normally blocked, for example, “六四事件” (June 4th incident), surprisingly returned some results and no censorship notice. This temporary lift of censorship ended at 9am but started and stopped a few more times into early afternoon, as if literally somebody was flipping a switch on and off at Sina headquarters.
Update on June 2: Sina is still constatnly swtiching between those two method.
Update on June 8: From June 3-4th and onwards, Sina Weibo seems to switch back to explicit compelte block for those keywords.

Change in Tact
To understand what is happening you need to be familiar with Sina’s various censorship methods. We observed and reported last year that Sina had implemented new tactics to censor particular keyword searches. Just days before the June 4th anniversary, Sina is again tweaking its censorship mechanisms. During the morning hours of May 31, Sina completely abandoned its old style, explicit approach to censorship, which displayed a message but no search results:
“According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results for [the blocked keyword] can not be displayed.”
No, Sina has not suddenly decided to fully support freedom of speech. On the contrary, it would appear that Sina is using more advanced and subtler methods to censor search results. All keywords mentioned below are normally explicitly and completely blocked. But each behaved a little bit differently on the morning of May 31.