The entertainment industries’ quest to root out piracy on the Internet has yet again resulted in commercial censorship. A few weeks ago Google announced that it would start filtering “piracy related” terms from its ‘Autocomplete‘ and ‘Instant‘ services and today they quietly rolled out this questionable feature.
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.
Naturally, the companies and services that have been removed from Google's instant searches are angry. "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," said Simon Morris of BitTorrent Inc.
RapidShare also shared its sentiments. "We embrace that certain search suggestions will not put a wrong complexion on RapidShare anymore, but we are concerned that at the same time the legitimate interests of our users will also be affected," the service said. "RapidShare is one of the most popular websites worldwide. Every day hundreds of thousands of users rely on our services to pursue their perfectly legitimate interests…Google has obviously gone too far."
The change shouldn't significantly affect your daily browsing, but it shows that Google will serve the entertainment industry when pressured and it's only fair to question how far the company is willing to go. TorrentFreak also notes that the current blacklist appears somewhat random. Although uTorrent and Xunlei are excluded from results, BitComet and Vuze aren't. Likewise, other filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, 4shared, HotFile and MediaFire are still visible.
http://torrentfreak.com/
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