A few months ago, it was reported that Google, the world’s leading search engine, is working on a secret project for the Chinese market. That secret project, Dragonfly product, was a censored search engine for China.
However, as per the latest reports, amid outcry inside and outside of Google, the company has set aside its controversial push to launch a censored search service in China. The pressure seems to have caused leaders to “shelve it at least in the short term,” said the report from The Intercept.
The report about Google working on a censored search engine for China had already caused an outcry among human rights activists who were concerned that the company would block a long list of foreign websites and search queries including the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and information about the Chinese leadership.
As per the report, many Google engineers working on the project have reportedly been reassigned to projects related to Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, and other countries.
In 2008, Google purchased 265.com, a popular Chinese web directory, which also has a search function, but queries are redirected to Baidu, China’s most popular search engine. Before they’re sent to Baidu, however, they are also sent back to a Google database. Google was reportedly using this as a way to effectively build blacklists to make Dragonfly compliant with Chinese censorship regulations.
Google then apparently used this large set of queries to “improve” its own results. The “data analysis system” that Google was using to develop Dragonfly was not disclosed to the privacy team. After raising concerns, Dragonfly engineers have been prevented from analyzing 265.com queries, and that has brought the project to a standstill.
After years of being absent from China’s web search market, Google had wanted to launch the Dragonfly product in early 2019. Alphabet’s search engine platform was pulled out by the company in 2010 while its video platform YouTube has been blocked in China.
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Last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google had no immediate plans to launch Dragonfly in China, although his answers were vague enough to not rule out any future action.
(Source)
