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Censorship is a red herring.

It's the Chinese firewall censoring the sites, so even if Google did link the site in the search results, users wouldn't be able to click and access it.

The bigger issue with project dragonfly was sharing user search queries with the government. This seems terrifying but pretty much every other tech company (Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) existing in China does this with their Chinese user data.

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Just a bit of a side note, but I was in China last fall, and using Bing there were many search results that you could not click through. However the few sentence description below the search link often had information that would be censored elsewhere.

It's true that users wouldn't be able to go to censored sites. But then they'd know that the highest-ranking site for their search was censored and might ask why, which seems like a net positive.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that is still a terrible user experience, which is why Microsoft and every other search engine in China do not attempt to do that.

That's why this is a red herring. The problem you want to solve is Chinese citizen awareness when Google is just trying to provide the information that's available.

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