At the end of last year, Google decided they would do their part to make copyright work better online. Among changes like acting on reliable takedown requests within 24 hrs and improving AdSense anti-piracy review was this little tidbit:
We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose.
Amidst pressure from the entertainment industry, it looks like these changes are finally going into effect. The idea here is that people are downloading things illegally because, when they search for those things in Google, the illegal links come up first. It doesn’t seem that Google has actually removed search results, but you will no longer see these “piracy related” terms in Autocomplete or Google Instant.
Of course, this raises concern among a lot of people. Google uses an algorithm to rank pages. The algorithm is basically looking at user activity to figure out what you see in your search results, Google Instant, and autocomplete. Censoring the results here is seen by many as a slippery slope. Where do we draw the line? Will we see other terms censored or added?
via TorrentFreak