Early in December, Google vowed to distance itself from piracy. To do so, the company agreed that it would remove terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in their Autocomplete and Instant services.
Google has since rolled this questionable feature. Now terms like BitTorrent, uTorrent, and RapidShare are filtered out. However, terms like BitComet and Vuze remain, which suggests that the keywords were picked rather arbitrarily.
This censoring does not affect full search results, but it does show a clear signal that Google is willing to filter its services more proactively than anyone thought.
However, now that the entertainment industry has gotten their way, they'll pressure Google in an attempt to get them to censor search results too.
It appears to be only a matter of time until those results do disappear.
Google has since rolled this questionable feature. Now terms like BitTorrent, uTorrent, and RapidShare are filtered out. However, terms like BitComet and Vuze remain, which suggests that the keywords were picked rather arbitrarily.
This censoring does not affect full search results, but it does show a clear signal that Google is willing to filter its services more proactively than anyone thought.
However, now that the entertainment industry has gotten their way, they'll pressure Google in an attempt to get them to censor search results too.
It appears to be only a matter of time until those results do disappear.
