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posted by martyb on Friday March 30 2018, @04:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the autocompete dept.

Google has censored the term "Kodi" from its search engine's autocomplete feature, despite it being completely legal open source software:

Google has banned the term "Kodi" from the autocomplete feature of its search engine. This means that the popular software and related suggestions won't appear unless users type out the full term. Google has previously taken similar measures against "pirate" related terms and confirms that Kodi is targeted because it's "closely associated with copyright infringement."

[...] The company demotes results from domain names for which it receives many DMCA takedown notices, for example, and it has also removed several piracy-related terms from its autocomplete feature. The latter means that when one types "pirate ba" it won't suggest pirate bay. Instead, people see "pirate bays" or "pirate books" as suggestions. Whether that's very effective is up for debate, but it's intentional.

[...] The Kodi team, operated by the XBMC Foundation, is disappointed with the decision and points out that their software does not cross any lines. "We are surprised and disappointed to discover Kodi has been removed from autocomplete, as Kodi is perfectly legal open source software," XBMC Foundation President Nathan Betzen told us.

The Kodi team has been actively trying to distance itself from pirate elements. They enforce their trademark against sellers of pirate boxes and are in good contact with Hollywood's industry group, the MPAA.

Related: MPAA Chief Focuses Attention on the Kodi Platform
Hollywood Strikes Back Against Illegal Streaming Kodi Add-Ons
Kodi Returns to its Roots With an Xbox One Release
Kodi Media Player Addon Developers Under Pressure from ACE, Dish Network


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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday March 30 2018, @04:50AM (17 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday March 30 2018, @04:50AM (#660286) Homepage Journal

    Link to its website. The text of your link should be relevant terms

    It's even better if you deep link to pages that are in its site rather than just its homepage

    That makes the whole site more robust against fluctuations in popularity of particular words

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by jmorris on Friday March 30 2018, @06:11AM (16 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Friday March 30 2018, @06:11AM (#660289)

    You aren't paying attention. This is deliberate manual intervention in the results, not normal SEO nonsense. Google is Evil. They have been for some time now, they censor a lot of stuff on their search, news and Youtube properties. They aren't YET doing like Microsoft and searching for crimethink in Google Docs and personal emails but they will.

    Cut. The. Cord.

    Most people can't entirely sever Google from their devices, but you can switch to a search engine that doesn't censor, move you email and begin consciously making the effort to minimize Google's impact on your daily life and minimize how much of your personal information they suck up.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @06:38AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @06:38AM (#660295)

      a search engine that doesn't censor

      Should I google for that? I haven't found one yet. YaCy is the closest, but it doesn't really work that well.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @06:59AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @06:59AM (#660298)

        DuckDuckGo is pretty good. But yeah we all need to "cut the cord". We need to except that we alone control what we do with our personal info and that if we ultimately don't like what is done with it or don't like the service that we are given in exange for it that we can choose to find another one. I cut all ties to google three years back. Deleted my account, started using other services, and installed a custom ROM on my phone that didn't include Gapps. I'm happy I did.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @06:43PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 30 2018, @06:43PM (#660470)

          DDG is just a search engine aggregator that claims to remove 'personal' info. It is still 'powered' by the big boys. I wouldn't trust them any more than anybody else. Why, you might ask? Lo and behold, a cookie, and no milk! What could be more cruel? Sorry, the whole idea of trust is out the window. I like the idea of running my own crawler that I can choose to share or not. Thing is I need to run the crawler very discreetly to avoid looking like an attack. Kinda means I need my own local DNS too :-)

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday March 30 2018, @07:12AM

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday March 30 2018, @07:12AM (#660301) Homepage Journal

      Google can't manually interfere with everything.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday March 30 2018, @07:14AM (9 children)

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday March 30 2018, @07:14AM (#660302) Homepage Journal

      I'll be happy to use DuckDuckGo all the time when the day comes that I don't have to switch from DuckDuckGo to Google because I can't find something important by praying to The Duck.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Spamalope on Friday March 30 2018, @01:10PM (2 children)

        by Spamalope (5233) on Friday March 30 2018, @01:10PM (#660351) Homepage

        Has Duck started it's own search system? It was an aggregator when I first looked, so censoring will affect them too.

        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 30 2018, @03:36PM (1 child)

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday March 30 2018, @03:36PM (#660406) Journal

          Censoring autocomplete is different from censoring results:

          https://www.google.com/search?q=kodi [google.com]

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          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday March 30 2018, @06:20PM

            by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 30 2018, @06:20PM (#660459) Journal

            Your point is good and valid... and the other comments are reacting to implicit threats, and taken in that sense also valid.

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            Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 2) by mrpg on Friday March 30 2018, @06:13PM (4 children)

        by mrpg (5708) Subscriber Badge <reversethis-{gro ... yos} {ta} {gprm}> on Friday March 30 2018, @06:13PM (#660456) Homepage

        That happened to me for a week and then I decided to use https://www.startpage.com/ [startpage.com]

        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 30 2018, @06:22PM (3 children)

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 30 2018, @06:22PM (#660460) Journal

          Why? What does it do? The link looks just like a base google page with a pretty background.

          If I want to link to sites I frequently go to, I already don't use google. I've got a panel of bookmarks that's a lot more convenient.

          --
          Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
          • (Score: 2) by mrpg on Friday March 30 2018, @07:54PM (2 children)

            by mrpg (5708) Subscriber Badge <reversethis-{gro ... yos} {ta} {gprm}> on Friday March 30 2018, @07:54PM (#660505) Homepage

            It gives better results than duckduckgo.
            https://www.startpage.com/uk/protect-privacy.html [startpage.com]

            • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 30 2018, @10:22PM (1 child)

              by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 30 2018, @10:22PM (#660561) Journal

              How is it different from just using Google?

              --
              Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
              • (Score: 4, Informative) by toddestan on Friday March 30 2018, @10:41PM

                by toddestan (4982) on Friday March 30 2018, @10:41PM (#660576)

                It's more of an anti-tracking thing. You type your query into Startpage, Startpage goes and searches Google and gives you the results back, so (at least in theory) the big G doesn't know what you searched for. But other than that, it's just Google search.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by toddestan on Friday March 30 2018, @10:52PM

        by toddestan (4982) on Friday March 30 2018, @10:52PM (#660585)

        I've been using DuckDuckGo for a long time now, it's been a good while since I've had any luck finding something on Google when the Duck comes up empty. If I can't find something on DuckDuckGo, I've found the only thing Google seems to be good at is wasting my time with endless pages of garbage search results.