“BitTorrent” Censored From Google
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.
I’m not convinced that this proves “Google is willing to filter it’s services more proactively.” Google toying with autocomplete to fight piracy is the equivalent of McDonalds swapping brands of packaged salt over nutrition concerns.
The idea that Google did this because they fear the entertainment industry is ridiculous. Google is a profit driven corporation that wants as many people using their products (YouTube, and soon Google Music) as possible. Making it more difficult to access illegal sources will drive more users to their sites and generate more profit for the company. We need to stop acting like Google is simply a benevolent public service trying to protect everyone from evil copyright laws and spread free knowledge, they are making billions of dollars from making knowledge accessible to all. It has many benefits but also has many consequences (namely devaluing content and driving journalists and artists to the poverty line).
“Now terms like BitTorrent, uTorrent, and RapidShare are filtered out”
This is not true, I can still type them all, and they still come up with a bunch of options, for me to download, as much free stuff as I want.