Google Instant censorship: Dangerous precedent or no big deal?

Entertainment industry groups won a very small victory this week in their quest against piracy, as search giant Google created a filter preventing piracy-related terms from popping up in autocomplete as web surfers enter them in a Google Instant-enabled window.

That decision by Google created quite the uproar as journalists criticized the company and cries of “Censorship!” quickly spread. But just how big of a deal is it?

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First of all, let’s take a look at what Google is actually censoring.

There were quite a number of misleading headlines that came out about the situation, especially in the blogging sector. What Google has actually done is prevented their autocomplete service from finishing certain terms that are associated with piracy, like uTorrent, BitTorrent, and anything else with the word “torrent” in it. If you physically type the word “torrent” into a Google search field, you’ll still get the same results you would have before.

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Basically, Google is still happy to find anything to do with torrents for you, but they’re not going to help you finish spelling it or suggest that you check it out.

It should also be noted that this is not the first time Google has censored autocomplete results. Back in September, the company actually began censoring the autocomplete feature for “naughty” words like "penis" and "vagina".  Sure, Google will find you all the porn you can handle and then some, but helping you spell an integral part of the human anatomy is over-the-top.

Inane? It does sound that way when you put it in those terms, especially since they’re still more than happy to suggest words like methamphetamine, one of the most abused drugs in the world.

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The problem, however, is that many of the websites and businesses that have “torrent” as part of their name are perfectly legal. That’s not to say that you won’t find pirated material by using them, but there are also perfectly legitimate reasons for using them too.

Simon Morris expressed this sentiment well in a statement to TorrentFreak regarding the situation: “We respect Google’s right to determine algorithms to deliver appropriate search results to user requests. That being said, our company’s trademarked name is fairly unique, and we’re pretty confident that anyone typing the first six or seven letters deserves the same easy access to results as with any other company search,” he said.

There’s also the chance that these rather subtle forms of censorship could gradually increase to the point that we’re looking at full-fledged censoring of search results before we’ve even realized what has happened. If we let Google get away with this, where do we say “Stop!”?

Where it stops should be a question that we’re all asking ourselves right now. In fact, we should be deciding whether it should have ever started in the first place, and let Google know about our thoughts on the matter.

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