They withdrew from China due to the scorn of their security team having their asses handed to them by the people's liberation army ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora ). 3 years later the exact same thing happened with the NSA ( Snowden leaks, NYTimes front page quotes of Google engineers swearing at internal network diagrams appearing in the leaks ), only ragequitting your home country doesn't quite work so easily

Snark aside, the asymmetry in their dealings with foreign governments compared to their own is quite illuminating, and the above is by far not the only such incident

More context on the "backtracking" remark: https://theintercept.com/2018/08/08/google-censorship-china-...

They bought a Chinese directory with a "search engine" that just redirects to Baidu, but kept all the juicy search terms to seed the future product.