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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 03 2018, @06:16AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 03 2018, @06:16AM (#646891)

    I really hate to have draw the analogy for you like this, jmorris, I am afraid I may be insulting your intelligence. But then I remember most of your posts, and I realize there is no danger of that. OK! So what do they call alt-tech? Right, tech that does not work. The Alt-right web is a technical fiasco, a den of scum and villiany and bad coding! Gab sucks, and could not even load unicode, because, you know, it's not white.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Saturday March 03 2018, @06:59AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Saturday March 03 2018, @06:59AM (#646908)

    How long has it been since you looked at gab? I have used the occasional unicode there for a year now. They have a growing user base of Europeans who need a way to speak freely as their countries drop the ban hammer. Not having offices outside the US allows them to tell the EU to go perform an improbable act of self procreation when they try their hate speech crap. Just use a solid VPN and never ID yourself because they come to your door now for political dissent over there.

    Most of the Alt-Tech world is in furious development, trying to outrun the explosive growth happening as people come flooding in after each round of account banning at the legacy sites. At the same time trying to discover new funding models to pay for the rapid growth since neither of the normal ones are open to us. No venture capital or funding operations through stock appreciation and no advertising. It is going to be a very different Internet.