News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

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

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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
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?

[ Parent | on HN ]
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."

[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
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?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More by endtime on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @06:46PM (#2145851)
Racial ones too, I believe.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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?

[ Parent | on HN ]