Note that this is not about censoring search results. This is about censoring search term autocompletion and pick lists. If you are not careful a search may be entered for something other than what you were trying to express. If you are careful or use a different interface, you can still search the Google index for these terms.
The magazine 2600 had previously mapped a black list of terms censored from "Google suggest" and "Google instant".
http://www.2600.com/googleblacklist/
Blogoscoped discussed plans by Google to expand this censorship.
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/175915.html
According to the report at torrentfreak some new terms have been added to Google's black list. Below are the reported new terms.
bittorrent
megaupload
rapidshare
torrent
utorrent
It also says that any other combination with "torrent", such as "ubuntu torrent" is banned. |
I overlooked the following terms reported elsewhere in the torrentfreak story:
xunlei
µTorrent
The story says:
"Morris further points out that the inclusion of Xunlei is a little hypocritical since Google is one of the investors in the Chinese BitTorrent client." |
> The story says:
> "Morris further points out that the inclusion of Xunlei is a little
> hypocritical since Google is one of the investors in the
> Chinese BitTorrent client."
On the contrary. It would be hypocritical if Google exempted a search term from filtering because Google had a financial stake in it. |
Quoting:
<< ...Without a public notice Google has compiled a seemingly arbitrary list of keywords for which auto-complete is no longer available. Although the impact of this decision does not currently affect full search results, it does send out a strong signal that Google is willing to censor its services proactively, and to an extent that is far greater than many expected.
Among the list of forbidden keywords are “uTorrent”, a hugely popular piece of entirely legal software and “BitTorrent”, a file transfer protocol and the name of San Fransisco based company BitTorrent Inc. As of today, these keywords will no longer be suggested by Google when you type in the first letter, nor will they show up in Google Instant.
... >> |
