Remember how a few days back Google removed support for H.264 from Chrome and made us wonder they are turning evil? Here is something that may add to the debate. According to the reports Google has started blocking piracy related keywords from their “Instant Search”.
If that sent chills down your spine, calm down, it’s not that big. All they have done is stopped auto-suggesting common piracy related keywords like torrents, rapidshare and megaupload in Instant Search. You can still type the whole word and search as before. In fact once you type the whole keyword the auto-suggest starts working again. So if you type “LOST tor” it won’t suggest “LOST torrent” but if you type “LOST torrent” it will suggest “LOST torrent download”.
What they have, surprisingly, not blocked is the names of popular piracy related websites like piratebay, mininova and other piracy related keywords like DVDRip.
Personally, I don’t support piracy at all so I like this move. Since user will no longer see such keywords it will probably stop people from accidentally discovering the load of piracy related content on the web. What I don’t like is that it feels like Google has started taking decisions on the behalf of people on the Internet. And that will be bad if they suddenly decide to turn evil.
[via Tech2]
