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from the do-no-evil-only-when-it-suits-us dept.
"Give us torrents or give us freedom!" Cried absolutely no one in Australia after Google decided to start filtering out torrent site results from search queries submitted from Australian locations.
The tech giant has voluntarily agreed to remove sites that facilitate copyright infringement from its search results, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. Google has reached a voluntary agreement with Australian ISPs and content rights holders to de-index sites that have been blocked by internet providers under recent laws.
With the search giant of the internet on their side local content owners will no longer need to jump through hoops and costs to petition for sites to be occluded based on a purely voluntary agreement between ISPs and and content owners. The Australian Federal Government introduced laws in 2015 for blocking sites deemed to be breaching copyrights, following up in 2018 with 65 sites and over 378 domains blocked. This way of dealing with the issue has been roundly criticized for years by interested parties.
In response to this recent agreement a spokesperson said "Google supports effective industry-led measures to fight piracy," while local content representative Graham Burke has said that "Google is leading people to the back door" "shamelessly facilitating crime by leading people to pirate sites" while everyday Australians follow the advice of a former Communications Minister and just use a VPN making the filtering by Google moot.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @06:52PM (8 children)
Soylent Search Engine?
Because everybody knows websites are powered by people! It's the green alternative to coal! :)
Seriously though, maybe it is time to start a companion non-profit project to do web spider and results aggregation, but headquartered in a country with more lax IP laws and subcontracting spidering services to fellow non-profits headquartered in nations whose datacenters we need access to. This won't eliminate all potential censorship of search results, but it would provide a reduction compared to current threats both corporate and government in nature.
Food for thought.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:29PM (2 children)
Even better, make it decentralized and hook it up to darknets like TOR, Freenet, etc. Don't make it purely piracy, or black market based either. Search terms and domains that are blocked by governments should be covered by the service (with the exception of the nasty bullshit like KP).
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:39PM
Already attempt some level of that, metasearch, distributed search, etc. Apache Solr(?) can do per site search results and network together for aggregated results I believe.
As much as I would like to see a fully decentralized search network, it is more likely to succeed as a non-profit driven project than attempting to get another p2p project off the ground. As it is right now we are already seeing IRC, bittorrent, Tor, and I2P all dwindling in interest. There are a lot of other p2p projects out there in various states of interest and progress, but from what I have seen none are becoming ubiquitous on account of their decentralization along. 'Marketed Faux Privacy' seems to have plenty of mindshare and traction.
In order for a search engine, even a decentralized one, to succeed, it is going to need default search links in major browsers, android/iOS search app/widget/plugins, and enough financial pull to seed the critical mass of nodes to make it interest the niche users and then the mainstream populace. It took Mozilla... 5-7 years to succeed after Netscape, and they only did because of Google Financing and some punk kid writing Phoenix (which became Firefox, and was originally native GTK(2?) not XUL!) If it hadn't been for that clean sheet browser design Mozilla would have died as the Netscape Browser Bundle and its Mozilla rebadge (I don't even remember what it was called, but it sucked BADLY.)
Soylent Search Engine seems needed even if only as the seed to a more advanced and decentralized system, just like the pre-XUL Phoenix builds were.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday May 16 2019, @12:20AM
Even better, make it decentralized
Yes, please [yacy.net]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:46PM (4 children)
You already have DuckDuckGo. The only problem is it sucks as a search engine when lined up alongside Google.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @10:28PM
Actually, it doesn't. It's no better than google, but then again it's no worse. At least for the searches I do, YMMV.
But google now certainly does suck when lined up alongside google of only a few years ago.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 16 2019, @01:08AM (2 children)
Do you mean, sucks beside uncensored Google, or sucks beside censored Google?
Many of us just loved Google, when Google was new. We loved it less, as time went on, because ubiquitous tracking. And, loved it less as tracking became more invasive. Depending on philosophy and politics, Google becomes more unlovable as Google takes sides on issues which are of no legitimate concern to Google. Censorship? If Google refuses to provide information on subjects in which people are interested, then Google loses much of it's love.
We can't have the Google of a decade ago. It's gone. The Google of today is sucking. The Google of tomorrow promises to suck a helluva lot harder.
(Score: 5, Informative) by deimtee on Thursday May 16 2019, @03:09AM (1 child)
I didn't like the tracking, but that wasn't why I stopped using google. It used to be that you found what you searched for; now you get what google thinks you should be looking at based on the words you used, or similar words, or even not very similar words if it gets more ads.
It went from being the precise tool of a hacker's* search engine to a "here's what's popular with the masses" pile of crap. The worst of it is that if you go to the trouble of using an uncommon word to narrow results they strip it out with the patronising "Not many pages used the term Foobar, so we searched for Funny Beiber for you".
They lost me completely when they disabled verbatim search entirely.
They can print "Don't be Evil" on a large piece of angle iron and shove it up their collective arse.
*Old school ESR meaning of hacker.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 16 2019, @04:05PM
Being the kind, considerate kind of person, I think we should preheat that cold iron for them. I'll be right back with the oxy-acetylene cart!