Comment by trotsky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trotsky | Hacker News Reader

Wow, 22 paragraphs about the removal of 5 keywords from instant and auto? Jesus, what will folks have to do - type out their entire search term and hit enter? Censorship?

I don't even think this is accurate. Granted, there is something off about how the terms stall out in instant, but for example as soon as I finish typing bittorrent both instant and auto complete kick back in and show as normal: http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/6820/bittorrentac.png

In contrast, if you type out a sex term it quits instant and auto complete and never restarts them, you must hit enter: http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/7349/asexac.png (mostly safe for work - no results)

I imagine the real reason google is doing this is ad placement. After all instant is just about having the ads up longer. Google "bittorrent" and a standard search term like "real estate" - notice any differences? Yup, they don't sell ads on the bittorrent serp (just like they wont sell adsense on a torrent tracker)

> I don't even think this is accurate. Granted, there is something off about how the terms stall out in instant

There's no stalling, it's completely disabled and will not suggest anything until you type the entire word.

> In contrast, if you type out a sex term it quits instant and auto complete and never restarts them

So? How does that have anything to do with justifing blocking BitTorrent terms? If I type "install bitt[orrent]" or "install ut[orrent]", I get no suggestions as it is clearly blocked.

I would guess people are searching "bittorrent [copyright material]" and someone has had their lawyers shout at google for it, because it could be seen as prompting users into pirating. Like "torrent li[nkin park]" might have got them in trouble because before the person was just searching "torrent li[nux]" so now a user who wants a legit torrent for linux is being told oh hey you can pirate linkin park albums too!

(I don't agree that this is right, but it seems the sensible explanation to me)

Er, sorry, accidental downmod from 4 to 3, intended upmod to 5.

It's rather obviously not "completely disabled" if I can type "bittorrent" and then get auto-suggestions.

By completely, I mean there's no suggestions whatsoever, and I said "until you type the entire word".

You don't get to redefine the definition of "completely" just to make your argument sound better.

Suggestions are completely disabled while typing the blocked words. If I said partially, that would imply that suggestions are still given while typing the blocked words, excluding the blocked word itself.

Agree. I know Google is the new evil but all they've done is turned off autocomplete. If I type "[film name] torrent" in Google, I still get an instant, direct link to the piretebay download of said movie.

I think it actually makes sense to hide from autocomplete - because, after all, you don't want to entice people to go for the illegal stuff: If they want to find it, they can. But you don't want to suggest it first thing.

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