It should be noted that despite the headline - Google is not censoring any search terms. They're just not allowing certain words in the search auto-complete. A controversial move to be sure, but something they've done with other words since the introduction of search auto complete
Aren't there plenty of sexual terms that are already "censored" in the instant suggestions database? That hasn't affected anything so I doubt this will have any large scale impact on file sharing.
It's one thing for them to refrain from auto-completing the users' first few letters with suggestions including the filthiest words in the language. That's quite understandable to me. After all, it seems unlikely that those results are what users ordinarily want and there is a very high attentional cost to offering them wrongly (from the UI perspective).
But in this case, they're filtering out perfectly ordinary words for perfectly legitimate network protocols and actual products. If I type "utorren" there's no reason Google should withhold the "t" other that pure evil search-term engineering.
It's incomprehensible to me that a company that refused to filter "democracy" in China will agree to demote "utorrent" in America.
But how can not returning search suggestions that the user in all probability actually wants be in their corporate interest? How could this do anything but detract from the #1 value Google has: the quality of their search?
What miniscule gain in the reduction of uTorrent users or the temporary appeasement of RIAA/MPAA demands could this possibly be worth the debasing of their brand image?
It strikes me this could be a clever flack reducing measure. Censoring from autocomplete would be a good way of reducing the annoyance felt by content creators as they google their own title.
Exactly. There's obviously a difference between Google actively suggesting a term that could encourage piracy, versus providing the results for people who already have that query in their mind and choose to submit it as a search.
Your claim that Google is not censoring search results is entirely unfounded. You are correct about filtering being done on auto-complete, but Google also filters the living snot out of results. They have always filtered results, and providing "relevant" pages for the given search terms is only one of their goals.
> It is declining to actively push certain terms on the user.
Let's say a search engine in China was obligated to "decline actively pushing a certain query", would we not call that censorship? Can someone explain my semantic hangup?
