I was surprised. Yesterday I wanted to play John Lennon's song "Woman is the nigger of the world" for a friend who had never heard it. Google autocomplete shut off at the "n" and wouldn't show the song's title. Google has made their own bed here by manipulating their autocomplete for a variety of reasons already. They certainly can't complain that they can't do it, or that it is too hard. They are doing it, and for fairly trivial situations such as avoiding presenting a disturbing word to a search engine user. This opens up the door for all kinds of requests for censorship, whether the politically correct ones like preventing the dread "n word" from appearing without someone actually typing it, or this idea that people can be prevented from visiting questionably legal sites by manipulation of autocomplete.
As soon as they deciding to do all kinds of manipulation they left themselves open to this kind of thing, and it seems like they pretty much have to go along with it, don't they? I mean, do they really want to make the case that showing someone an offensive word is worse than letting people see dangerous and questionably legal activities?
How much protection do Google users need from the horrors of the raw unfiltered internet?
Gradually this will reduce the effectiveness of their search engine.
