Thursday, January 7, 2010

Why Google Sucks, Reason 2,034: Catering To Terrorists

Currently making the rounds of the internet: Google has a "bug" that prevents autocomplete for a specific search term.

This is a bug, my tailfeathers. They are afraid of insulting islam in even the slightest way. You (should) already know that Google is willing to bend on being the finder of all kinds of information to all people everywhere, based on government restrictions. Now we find out they seem to be willing to bend to pressure from terrorists also. I saw somebody mention that Bing doesn't censor autocomplete terms for "islam is." What I didn't see (yet, today) is a comparison with Bing, side-by-side. So I made one.

Google has not fixed their little "bug" yet, by the way . . .

Google vs. Bing "religion is" search autocomplete suggestions: (click to embiggen)
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Is Bing going the other way? Hmm. . . .

Note that I had to enable autocomplete in Bing and I never use the autocomplete in Google. I find the feature an amusing nuisance, but sometimes it is amusing, so I don't mind it in most applications. At least it's not as bad as MS Word "fixing" your spelling as you type (grr...). This also highlights one of the differences in approach between the two companies. Google is supposed to be where you go to find anything. Bing is supposed to help you make decisions and so, as a google-esque search engine, currently, it sucks. This playing politics at Google is really getting to me. I'm trying to use other search engines, but google is the best so far and I need to find esoteric information ALL DAY at work.

( . . . when it comes to that, I guess I should find a new place for my blog, too!)

Oh, and for the sake of thoroughness, I went ahead and hit Yahoo! also. I guess they just put themselves on top of my list of search engines to try out . . .

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