Google employees found that work on the version of the search engine for China continues

Several news and articles were published on Habré that Google planned to launch a version of its search engine for China in full accordance with the rules and laws of this country. That is, it was supposed to be a “fixed” version of a search service with censorship. After thousands of employees of the Internet company protested, and the corporation had internal conflicts, the management announced the suspension of the development of Dragonfly (Google for China).

Teams that were involved in solving this problem were recalled and sent to solve other issues. After that, everything calmed down for a while. But not all Google representatives calmed down - there were those who were not satisfied with the general silence. This group conducted its own investigation, discovering a number of interesting facts.

The main thing is that work on the project code continues.

The investigation began immediately after Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google Corporation, did not speak out publicly regarding the refusal to develop a censored search engine version. Everything he said sounded pretty streamlined, the central idea was to suspend the project, but not to abandon it.

That is why a group of corporation employees who are not indifferent to censorship and other manifestations of suppressing publicity decided to control the future fate of Dragonfly. They learned that their colleagues who worked on the “censored search engine” did not receive a command to stop development. Instead, they were told to finish what they were doing and move on to new teams. In particular, they were sent to Google products in India, Indonesia, Russia, the Middle East and Brazil.

The validation team decided to look at the repositories of Dragonfly related code. So, the previous teams developed two mobile applications - Maotai and Longfei for the smartphone version of Dragonfly. The first application is intended for Android users, the second - for those who work with iOS.

Employees identified more than 500 code changes in the repositories in December and more than 400 changes in January and February this year. It turns out that even after the announcement of the suspension of work on the project, someone continues to improve applications. In general, starting from August 2017, the number of changes to the code made every month was about 150-500. That is, there is no particular decrease in activity.

As far as you can understand, 100 Google employees are still assigned to Dragonfly, which means that there are budget items for this team. Accordingly, someone is still working on a censored search engine.

Representatives of the company who are related to Dragonfly, but who wish to remain anonymous, confirm the continuation of the work. Google has not stopped trying to create a specialized search engine for China, although there are not as many people working on the project as before.

Some employees believe that the project is still dead, and the changes that are are improvements to the previous team, which seeks to complete its tasks. But finally, one can be sure of this only if the top management of the company announces a rejection of Dragonfly, and not a suspension of work. In the latter case, it is simply about freezing the project, which means the possibility of resuming work at any time.

Over the past few months, the corporation has lost several large executives and many talented developers who chose to leave the company, expressing their disagreement with the current policy. In addition to working on a censored search engine, Google itself has become much less transparent than before, as claimed by some retired employees. Therefore, those who do not like it leave.

The company management, realizing the importance of the Chinese market for business, does not plan to abandon expansion. “This is a wonderful, innovative market. We want to understand what we can do in China, so we started from the inside, ” said Pichai. He added that "taking into account how important the market is and how many users there are in China, we simply cannot help but think about it, and do not try to look into the future."