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A comment on Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More.

Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by dholowiski on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @06:01PM (#2145668)
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
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by radicaldreamer on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @06:46PM (#2145845)
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.
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by marshray on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @09:11PM (#2146274)
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.

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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by marshray on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @11:40PM (#2146608)
Just out of curiosity, can someone explain what it was about what I said that it deserves to be modded into negative numbers?

Did I break a rule, is this site overrun with fanboyism, or something else entirely?

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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by stanleydrew on Thursday January 27, 2011 @12:35PM (#2148684)
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by marshray on Thursday January 27, 2011 @01:11PM (#2148813)
Yeah I knew that which is why I wasn't complaining. Agreed, this is boring.
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by radicaldreamer on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @09:22PM (#2146306)
Agreed, it's definitely hypocritical of Google.

The whole "don't be evil" ideal has a two big caveats these days: 1) as long as it doesn't interfere with profits 2) or google's corporate interests.

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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by marshray on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @09:50PM (#2146363)
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?

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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by endtime on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @06:46PM (#2145851)
Racial ones too, I believe.
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by JonnieCache on Thursday January 27, 2011 @07:37AM (#2147574)
Yeah. You can't do this shit anymore:

http://uvtblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/why_do_black.j...

http://suggestoftheday.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/gsold....

At least the results aren't as funny. "Chinese people are aliens" is still a google-endorsed suggestion though. WHAT DO THEY KNOW?

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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by loup-vaillant on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @06:41PM (#2145826)
Once upon a time, a frog lived in a pool of water. One day, the water began to slowly grow hot…
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by Uhhrrr on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @07:04PM (#2145906)
I take your meaning, but as to your metaphor... http://www.theatlantic.com/james-fallows/boiledfrog/?cid=140
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by dhimes on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @10:37PM (#2146459)
Well, maybe not:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by Uhhrrr on Thursday January 27, 2011 @12:19PM (#2148607)
Interesting! I wonder why no one has tried to replicate the .2C/minute experiment?
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by dhimes on Thursday January 27, 2011 @02:20PM (#2149096)
Well, I have a couple of teenage boys...
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by bigfudge on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @07:07PM (#2145918)
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.
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by harrybr on Thursday January 27, 2011 @12:38AM (#2146743)
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.
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by amadvance on Thursday January 27, 2011 @07:23AM (#2147537)
"kill o" suggests "kill obama". Is Google encouraging to kill Obama ?

"kill osama bin laden" appears only with "kill os". Is this an hint of the Google priorities ?

These are obviously rhetorical questions.

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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by rhizome on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @06:36PM (#2145801)
Well, whatever they're doing it's never going to have any effect on blogspot, where the vast majority of filedrop blogs are located.
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by jcr on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @06:54PM (#2145877)
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.
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by smokeyj on Thursday January 27, 2011 @12:37AM (#2146741)
So they censoring their auto-complete list, isn't that still censoring?
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by moultano on Thursday January 27, 2011 @03:48AM (#2147160)
Censoring whom?
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by barredo on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @06:27PM (#2145758)
Well, I'll say "Google is not censoring any search results" but it is censoring any search terms, right?
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by JonnieCache on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @06:46PM (#2145846)
No. It is declining to actively push certain terms on the user.
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by smokeyj on Thursday January 27, 2011 @12:33AM (#2146730)
> 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?

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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by barredo on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @07:59PM (#2146063)
Well, I think that's it and you're right.
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by marshray on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @09:24PM (#2146310)
Could this be anything but a precursor to trying to filter out of the main search results?
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Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by jeza on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @07:38PM (#2145992)
The thin edge of the wedge, perhaps?
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