Censorship by Google

SOURCE:  Wikipedia, 2020-05-19

  • See also:  Criticism of Google: Web Search

  • "Google is suppressing our site. Please use social media buttons to share this and help us break through."

    Google and its subsidiary companies, such as YouTube, have removed or omitted information from its services to comply with its company policies, legal demands, and government censorship laws. Google's censorship varies between countries and their regulations, and ranges from advertisements to speeches. Over the years, the search engine's censorship policies and targets have also differed, and have been the source of internet censorship debates.

    Numerous governments have asked Google to censor what they publish. In 2012, Google ruled in favor of more than half of the requests they received via court orders and phone calls. This did not include China and Iran who had blocked their site entirely.

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    Search suggestions

  • See also: Search suggest drop-down list, and Criticism of Google: Web search

    In January 2010, Google was reported to have stopped providing automatic suggestions for any search beginning with the term "Islam is", while it continued to do so for other major religions. According to Wired.com, a Google spokesperson stated, "this is a bug and we're working to fix it as quickly as we can." Suggestions for "Islam is" were available later that month. The word "Bilderberg" and the family name "Buchanan" were also reportedly censored in the auto-complete results, but were available by February 2010 as well. Nonetheless, Google continues to filter certain words from autocomplete suggestions, describing them as "potentially inappropriate".

    The publication 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has compiled a list of words that are restricted by Google Instant. These are terms that the company's Instant Search feature will not search. Most terms are often vulgar and derogatory in nature, but some apparently irrelevant searches including "Myleak" are removed.

    As of January 26, 2011, Google's Auto Complete feature would not complete certain words such as "bittorrent", "torrent", "utorrent", "megaupload", and "rapidshare", and Google actively censors search terms or phrases that its algorithm considers as likely constituting spam or intending to manipulate search results.

    In September 2012, multiple sources reported that Google had removed bisexual from the list of blacklisted terms for Instant Search.

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    Criticism of Google: Web Search

    SOURCE:  Wikipedia, 2020-05-19

  • See also: Censorship by Google & Google Search

    As of December 12, 2012, Google's SafeSearch feature applies to image searches in the United States. Prior to the change three SafeSearch settings-"on", "moderate", and "off"-were available to users. Following the change, two "Filter explicit results" settings-"on" and "off"-were newly established. The former and new "on" settings are similar, and exclude explicit images from search results. The new "off" setting still permits explicit images to appear in search results, but users need to enter more specific search requests, and no direct equivalent of the old "off" setting exists following the change. The change brings image search results into line with Google's existing settings for web and video search.

    Some users have stated that the lack of a completely unfiltered option amounts to "censorship" by Google. A Google spokesperson disagreed, saying that Google is "not censoring any adult content," but "want to show users exactly what they are looking for-but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them."

    The search term "bisexual" was blacklisted for Instant Search until 2012, when it was removed at the request of the BiNet USA advocacy organisation.

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