Congress grills Google CEO over Chinese search engine plans

If you were hoping that Google chief Sundar Pichai would shed more light on his company's potential censored search engine for China... well, you'll mostly be disappointed. Rhode Island Representative David Cicilline grilled Pichai on the recently acknowledged Dragonfly project and mostly encountered attempts to downplay the significance of the engine. The Google exec stressed there were "no plans" to launch a search engine for China, and that Dragonfly was an "internal effort" and "limited" in scope. Pichai added that Google was "currently not in discussions" with Chinese officials. He also provided a non-committal answer when asked if Google would promise not to create a tool enabling Chinese surveillance.