"Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More"
http://newworldorderreport.com/News/tabid/266/ID/6830/Google-Starts-Censoring-BitTorrent-RapidShare-and-More.aspx
"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."
...
"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. All
combinations of the word "torrent" are also completely banned."
The article also mentions that autocomplete works for Xunlei, which is
the major torrent engine in China and a company that Google invested
money into a few years ago.
Although this does not seem to rank on a par with the "abortion" example
in Popline from a few years back
(http://www.librarian.net/stax/2276/librarians-notice-abortion-stop-word-take-action/
where they made "abortion" a stopword), Google's action is nevertheless
a type of censorship. Torrents are not illegal in and of themselves, the
torrent protocol is simply a type of peer-to-peer technology that uses
the real power of the internet to transfer information from one computer
to another.
An excellent article in SearchEngineLand discusses it in far more
detail, e.g.:
http://searchengineland.com/how-google-instant-autocomplete-suggestions-work-62592,
and they mention that the following types of searches are blocked:
* Hate or violence related suggestions
* Personally identifiable information in suggestions
* Porn & adult-content related suggestions
* Legally mandated removals
* Piracy-related suggestions
The guidelines describing what is and is not blocked are very detailed,
e.g. what is a "protected group"? And apparently, it can be spammed (of
course).
I think these articles discuss some excellent points to keep in mind
when considering the differences between library-type tools and the
popular web search engines.
--
James L. Weinheimer weinheimer.jim.l_at_gmail.com
First Thus: http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
Cooperative Cataloging Rules: http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/""
Received on Tue May 03 2011 - 10:34:53 EDT