At a session with a Google founding board member at the 2006 Web 2.0 Conference, in San Francisco, I stood up in the audience and asked how he could justify Google censoring its search results in China. Google’s entry into China came amid the swirl of that scandal, and the company’s account of its decision was nothing short of grotesque. Yahoo’s role as a “ police informant” (per the watchdog Reporters Without Borders) drew stinging criticism, with other Chinese writers such as Liu Xiaobo excoriating Yahoo’s co-founder Jerry Yang for betraying the Chinese people. Over the intervening eight years, Yahoo had made a string of horrifying compromises to maintain its operations there, culminating in a notorious incident in which the company helped the state prosecute the journalist Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison based on the contents of private Yahoo Mail messages. Yahoo, the seemingly unstoppable web giant that Google then trounced, had gotten into China back in 1998, the same year Google was founded. I vividly recall when Google entered the Chinese market, in 2006. Google had spent four years avidly cooperating with the Chinese Communist Party to censor search results, only to see its infrastructure attacked with, analysts suspected, the government’s acquiescence at a minimum.

In 2010, Google abruptly pulled out of China, after Chinese hacking of Gmail proved to be, finally, too unpalatable for the company. Read: Is this the week AI changed everything? To explain why Google has been spooked into doing something so drastic and improbable, we need to consider the company’s history, which has been characterized by similar follies. Harder to understand is why Google is copying Microsoft, with a plan to cram chatbots into every corner of the Googleverse.

Microsoft’s move is understandable: It has tried everything to make Bing a thing, and failed. Having spent billions on a search engine that no one uses, the company has sunk billions more into equipping it with the chatbot technology ChatGPT, on the theory that answering queries with automatically generated, falsehood-strewn paragraphs rather than links to webpages will be what finally persuades users to switch from Google Search.

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