Will Google Stop Autocompleting Baidu?
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, March 2 2011
After all, the Chinese search engine has been named on the U.S. Office of U.S. Trade Representative's latest "notorious markets" list of 30 of the worst online and offline venues for piracy and counterfeiting around the planet. And Google, you might recall, back in January began tweaking its Autocomplete feature to require the full typing out of offending terms like "BitTorrent" and "RapidShare," all a part of the on-going MPAA and RIAA-led anti-piracy war that has taken root inside the inner-workings of the world's most popular search engine.
Google's decision to conform Autocomplete to the desires of the American entertainment lobbies hasn't gotten the attention it probably deserves. (As others have mentioned, this isn't strictly about what's on the kosher side of the law; Google's happy to help you figure out how to kill somebody without getting caught, and, relatedly, how to dispose of a body.) Part of that might be because some of the advocacy groups we might normally see going after Google on something like this are wary of giving weight to the great 'search neutrality' debate that net neutrality opponents cooked up as a counterbalance to that higher-profile fight.
And that leaves Google tweaking its search results without much in the way of oversight. Asked for some greater transparency on just what search terms are too horrible for Google to autocomplete, a Google rep points to a generic 101 post explaining how Autocomplete works and an oblique post title "Making Copyright Work Online" that holds that when it comes to piracy, "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."
One could imagine that those offensive search terms could include "Baidu MP3," given that it's the Chinese search engine's pointers to copyrighted songs that has gotten it onto USTR's bad guy list. But then we'd have Google filtering out one of its (few) major global competitors. If all of this has the feel of a grand old political show -- as in, how hard is it really for people to type out all ten letters in "BitTorrent"? -- then this might be one instance where Google might judge that keeping up appearances in Washington isn't worth mucking around in the business of one of their biggest competitors in a market of some 1.3 billion people.