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posted by martyb on Friday March 02 2018, @07:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the under-the-gun-to-do-something dept.

Google has banned items containing the string "gun" in the name on its e-commerce search platform, accidentally targeting many innocuous items:

Google Shopping, which allows users to compare product prices from thousands of online retailers, has removed all 'gun' search results - even if the product is not gun-related.

Online shoppers have complained about being unable to browse dozens of products such as Burgundy wine, water guns and music by American rock band Guns N' Roses. Searches for products including nail guns, glue guns and Arsenal Football Club's Gunnersaurus dinosaur mascot also returns the message: "Your search did not match any shopping results."

Google has banned weapons listings since 2012, however online shoppers have highlighted certain product unavailability since the Florida school shooting on Valentine's Day which left 17 dead.

The block could be circumvented using alternate terms such as "handgnu" or "fully automatic firearm".

Also at Engadget.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 02 2018, @08:39PM (3 children)

    One of the big names in self-driving cars and supposedly most competent coding-centric corporations in the US just algorithmically screwed the pooch in a huge way. That's extremely relevant to any other code they write.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday March 02 2018, @08:51PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday March 02 2018, @08:51PM (#646622) Journal

    It's not relevant. They have thousands of coders working on very different tasks.

    Rather than a monolithic entity, Google is like a bunch of loosely connected terrorist cells. And the low energy Google Shopping cell can screw up without harming anyone but themselves. If Google paid that EU fine [wikipedia.org], Shopping may have made squat for the company over its 15 year lifetime.

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    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday March 03 2018, @01:55AM (1 child)

      by jmorris (4844) on Saturday March 03 2018, @01:55AM (#646766)

      Willfully missing the point. This is perfectly clear proof their internal processes have collapsed. No quality control, no sanity checks. One deranged SJW midwit can apparently check code into the production executable image for one of the most core services running on the Internet. Everything overrode by politics. And you seriously so out of the IT game that the very idea doesn't have you scared shitless at how out of control that place suddenly became? Google was the big throbbing brain super genius people with the nigh invincible command of all things IT. Do you want to get in a car controlled by these stupid evil fucks? Now imagine you have reason to know they mean you ill, you personally. Do you get in the car? Running afoul of the Clintons is called "Arkancide", we will need a new term for when Google has enemies liquidated. Guess we can just call it banhammered all the way to the meat?

      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday March 03 2018, @03:38AM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Saturday March 03 2018, @03:38AM (#646806)

        I guess you've never worked in a large corporation. They are frequently more like a bunch of small companies sharing some office buildings, and even have separate accounting (they buy and sell each other stuff). There's some commonality with stuff like facilities and HR, but for how they handle business decisions, coding/validation processes, etc., it can be entirely different between business groups.

        For a good example within Google itself, just take a look at Google Maps and Waze. They're both owned by Google, but they're entirely different. Different teams, different algorithms, different codebases, etc.

        Worse, you'd think that a big company would try to be more consistent, and "leverage synergies" (to use some business-speak) and eliminate redundancies, but there's a lot of internal politics and managers who do empire-building, so many things are not done for the good of the company, but for the benefit of a manager or division head. The upper management is only so competent, and only has so much visibility to see this and overcome it.