Well fifteen years ago Google was available in China. And at that time, while the masses simply used Baidu among the educated it was well known that Google delivered better results. And that was because Google capitulated to the censors. The government had a direct hotline into the Chinese offices of Google and could demand the search engine immediately ban certain keywords or results. It was Google that grew tired of this arrangement and decided to quit. They first moved the operations to Hong Kong, and then later the Chinese government decided to block the Hong Kong version of Google.

As a former Google employee, during my employment I found plenty of internal blog posts from the China team at that time about this arrangement. It was amazing to me that a lot of these internal blogs simply weren't deleted because people forgot about it and storage was so cheap.