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Google never really had any traction in China to start with, their search results were useless for Chinese content, so then they pretended to leave for some noble cause. Same with Amazon who tried for much longer until it gave up after decade.

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That's not true. They were at over 40% and growing at that time:

https://gs.statcounter.com/press/google-gained-market-share-...

That's assuming sites/users in China use statcounter, completely misleading data.

According Wikipedia and at least 2 different sources they quote, Google peaked in China at 29-35% and even that seems way too optimistic, if you ask anyone who used search in China back then or have been there. By my experience from years ago was Google search in Chinese language useless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China

Happy to go by your numbers, that was just the first search result. 35% is still very significant, so your initial claim about it having no traction and this being just a face-saving gesture was not correct.

Even that percentage of China’s population is equivalent to all of the EU’s.

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