Google has halted a data collection project in China and struck a major blow to the controversial Dragonfly project, according to a new report from The Intercept. According to the report, Google is still researching Chinese web searches in an effort to launch a search engine that complies with the country’s censorship regime, although an official launch seems to have been indefinitely postponed. But in the face of widespread opposition within the company, Google executives shuttered one of the project’s most central data sources, making the ongoing work far more difficult.

In August, The Intercept reported that Google had set up a dummy search engine at 265.com as a way of researching the Chinese market. Any queries made through 265…

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