Google Blocking Auto-Suggest On Torrent, Piracy Searches


Chances are you’ve used Google’s automatic suggestions when you start typing a search term, but there’s a big area where those features don’t work: many terms relating to torrents and torrent-serving sites. TorrentFreak reports that if you type the names of well-known content-sharing sites, such as The Pirate Bay, you now won’t see any suggestions at all.

Note that this doesn’t mean that Google has stopped indexing those sites altogether: it just means that if you’re searching for them, you’ll need to type out the whole search term, rather than taking advantage of Google’s automatic completion. That also means that Google Instant doesn’t work, so you won’t see any results until you hit Enter.

Google has conflicting issues here: it has long argued that it won’t censor the content it indexes, but it also wants to remain friendly with copyright holders. Making it harder to search for piracy-linked sites and technologies seems a reasonable middle ground, but does raise the issue of just how far that blacklist might be extended in the future. (That said, Google can put whatever it likes in its index.)

Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More [TorrentFreak]


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