Google had hoped to launch Dragonfly in ‘six to nine months’, according to leaked transcript of internal meeting

Google considered its Project Dragonfly censored Chinese search product as a means to reach “the next billion users” and was hoping for a launch in “six to nine months” although the future was “unpredictable”, according to a leaked transcript of a July 18 internal meeting.

Ben Gomes, Google’s search engine chief, told employees that China was “arguably the most interesting market in the world today” and that Google needed to be there, according to the transcript published on Tuesday by The Intercept.

“It’s not just a one-way street. China will teach us things that we don’t know,” Gomes said. “We have built a set of hacks and we have kept them. If there is a way to sort of freeze some of it, so it can be brought off the shelf and quickly deployed while we are dripping it all out, and changing it, we should take the long-term view.”

Project Dragonfly was earlier reported to be the code name for Google’s secret mission to develop a censored search app specifically for China, which would blacklist websites on human rights, democracy, religion and other issues deemed sensitive by the Chinese government, according to a report published in August by The Intercept.

A spokeswoman for Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the leaked transcript.

In August Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said that plans to re-enter China with a search engine were “exploratory” and in the “early stages”, according to Bloomberg.