Google CEO says China search engine would serve 99 per cent of queries, takes a swipe at Baidu

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai publicly addressed his company’s plans to re-enter the Chinese market with a search and news-oriented product for the first time on Monday, saying such a service would be capable of serving 99 per cent of queries.

Speaking at Wired’s 25th anniversary summit in San Francisco, Pichai described the Chinese market as “important for us to explore” given its size and the very high likelihood that it will become the largest and most lucrative internet-using population on the planet, according to an Abacus reporter who attended the event.

“We wanted to learn what it would look like if Google were in China,” Pichai said. “It’s very early, we don’t know whether we would or could do this in China but we felt like it was important for us to explore. I think it’s important for us given how important the market is and how many users there are.”

Project Dragonfly was earlier reported to be the code name for Google’s secret mission to develop a censored search app specifically for China, which would blacklist websites on human rights, democracy, religion and other issues deemed sensitive by the Chinese government, according to a report published in August by The Intercept. In August Pichai said that plans to re-enter China with a search engine were “exploratory” and in the “early stages”, according to Bloomberg.

Pichai’s comments on Monday suggested that Dragonfly was an experiment to see if Google could operate a search engine in China without violating government restrictions but he underlined that Google was committed to its values of freedom of expression, user privacy and the rule of law.