Google CEO Sundar Pichai may feel the heat for ‘Dragonfly’ in China

Google CEO Sundar Pichai might take the heat over the Chinese model of Google search engine named ‘Dragonfly’. As the company is allegedly testing a separate search engine designed for China. Though China is a tech-driven country, still it has a web search censorship on its citizens.

Pichai took the seat of being Google CEO in 2015, since then he has made no secret of his desire to take the search company back to China. As compared to Google’s founders who pulled out the search giant from the Chinese market in 2010 over censorship concern, Pichai has always been practical and rational about its presence in the world’s largest internet market, China.

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Under him, Google has invested in Chinese companies, met with its leaders and made it a priority to spread Google’s artificial intelligence technology across the country. But bringing Google search back would be Pichai’s boldest move ever.

Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally available.’ They viewed China as a threat to the company’s stance as a defender of the open web.

“People trust Google to share true information and the Chinese search app is a betrayal of that,” said a Google employee.

In an official statement, Google said that the company does not “comment on speculation about future plans.” In 2010, Brin, now president of parent Alphabet Inc., told the Wall Street Journal, that China’s policies of censorship and surveillance have the ‘same earmarks of totalitarianism’ as Soviet Russia.

According to a report, two months after opening an AI lab in Beijing, Pichai visited the city and said he was ‘looking forward to expanding’ research efforts there. Two years before that, at the Code Conference, Pichai said, “Google is for everyone. We want to be in China serving Chinese users.”

Google is also trying to establish its presence in China by developing a news aggregation app that would comply with country’s censorship laws.

Since the exit of Google’s search engine from China in 2010, Baidu Inc for traditional search, Meituan for food, Toutiao for news, Alibaba for e-commerce and WeChat for chat platforms, have come to dominate the market.

It has been quite some time that Pichai has been planning and plotting Google’s search moves in China, with a unidirectional approach based more on partnerships.

In the midst of all this  hidden agendas, Pichai seems to amend the bitter relation between the search giant’s founders and the Chinese authorities. However noble the intentions of Pichai might be, the decision of allowing Google search in China will be tainted because of the on-going U S-China trade war. It is now a wait-and-watch game for the rest of the tech world. Would Pichai pay for his efforts? The question will answered in near future.