After creating a racket by refusing to censor its search results when requested by a French music rights organization last year, Google oddly changed its mind earlier this year when it decided to censor various piracy-related keywords from its Instant and Autocomplete services. Now it looks like the list of words that are being filtered out has increased, according to a report from TorrentFreak.
Users who use Google to search for words like “torrent”, “bittorrent” and “rapidshare” will find that no suggestions and search results will appear before they type in the full word. Now, a new word has been added to the censor list and that is “mediafire”. It hasn’t been confirmed what other words have been filtered (Google won’t reveal the list) but it shows that Google is serious about its stance against piracy.
While users can still enter the search terms (if they know what they’re looking for) and Google won’t be censoring the search results, removing the help of Autocomplete and Instant should help curb a percentage of illegal downloads – at least until those users learn for themselves what words they should be looking for.
What is your stance about Google’s policy on censorship when it comes to piracy?