Google’s censored search engine might be gone, but here’s five other things it’s still doing in China

Google’s controversial Project Dragonfly might be on hold, but the company is still very much in China

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Google’s censored search engine might be gone, but here’s five other things it’s still doing in China

Published: 6:04pm, 18 Dec 2018Updated: 8:48am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Google’s plan to build a censored search engine in China might have ground to a halt. Engineers on the so-called Project Dragonfly are no longer allowed to view search queries from a decoy search engine set up in China, effectively pausing the venture, according to The Intercept.

A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on the report, and instead referred the South China Morning Post to Sundar Pichai’s previous congressional testimony. Last week, the CEO said Google has no current plans to relaunch a search engine in China.

The development brings Google back to where it was in 2010, when it pulled its search engine out of mainland China. Since then, most Google services have been blocked in the country.

But it doesn’t mean that Google is entirely absent in China. Here’s five other ways Google is still present in the country.

SMARTPHONE SOFTWARE

Whether it’s Huawei or Xiaomi, smartphones made by Chinese manufacturers almost invariably run Android.

But the Android OS you see in China are quite different from what’s in the rest of the world. For one, Google Play is missing; instead, you’ll find individual app stores from the phone makers themselves, or Chinese tech giants like Tencent or Baidu. Plus, Android on Chinese handsets tends to be heavily customized to work well with popular local apps like WeChat -- but it can feel clumsy and unnatural to users outside the country.