Sundar Pichai, the head of Google, has been under intense scrutiny recently.
Google has been experimenting with a censored search engine that would work in China, but it's not sure if it will ever launch the service, CEO Sundar Pichai said Monday.
Pichai, speaking during the Wired25 conference at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco, said Google started the internal project -- dubbed Project Dragonfly -- to see what was possible in China, a country with such strict censorship laws that many US companies, including Google, don't operate their services there.
The company has been roiled by reports about Project Dragonfly, the company's apparent plan to build a censored search engine for China, eight years after initially retreating from the country. At the time of the departure, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who grew up in the Soviet Union, cited the "totalitarianism" of Chinese policies.r
.Google has said little about the project. However, last month, Keith Enright, Google's chief privacy officer, confirmed during a hearing with the Senate Commerce Committee that there is indeed a Project Dragonfly, but he wouldn't elaborate.
Monday's remarks are the first public acknowledgment by Pichai that Google has been working on such a project.
Pichai noted Google is constantly "balancing our set of values of providing users access of information, freedom of expression, user privacy, but we also follow the rule of law in every country." China has been a particular challenge, he said.
"That's the reason we did the internal project," he said. "We wanted to learn what it would look like if Google were in China."
After building the project internally, Google found that it would "be able to serve well over 99 percent of queries," Pichai said. "There are many, many areas we'd be able to provide info that's better than what's available."
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