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French Court Frowns On Autocomplete, Tells Google To Remove Searches
New submitter Lexx Greatrex writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "Google had been sued by insurance company Lyonnaise de Garantie, which was offended by search results including the word 'escroc,' meaning crook, according to a story posted Tuesday by the Courthouse News Service. 'Google had argued that it was not liable since the word, added under Google Suggest, was the result of an automatic algorithm and did not come from human thought,' the article states. 'A Paris court ruled against Google, however, pointing out that the search engine ignored requests to remove the offending word... In addition to the fine, Google must also remove the term from searches associated with Lyonnaise de Garantie.'"
Show some balls google.
Disable everything that is google in France for 1 day and blame it on the court. In 3-6 weeks, when you have a valid fix, silently put that in.
Whenever French users search for "Lyonnaise de Garantie," Google should just return "Your search - Lyonnaise de Garantie - did not match any documents." And then a list of competing insurance companies.
There! Problem solved!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
You want corporate censorship? You got it. Be careful what you wish for.
I don't know whether Lyonnaise de Garantie are crooks, but this is the mother of Streisand effects.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Now "Lyonnaise de Garantie escroc" is a valid Google term, because I may have heard about this ruling and want to read more about it. So, auto-suggesting as such is highly relevant to me.
Then the solution is to remove "Lyonnaise de Garantie" from the search engine all together. Wipe them off any search result what-so-ever. Nothing in French law requires Google to index any site...
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Google most definitely has a monopoly in web advertising...it's why they're being investigated in Europe for antitrust. The DOJ lead who went after Microsoft ten years ago considers Google a monopoly, and Eric Schmidt told the U.S. Senate that Google was "in the area" of being a monopoly. I think there's so much resistance to admitting it on Slashdot because "monopoly!" was an anti-Microsoft rallying cry for so many years, and to put Google in the same boat kind of stings a little.
I have to say, though, that watching the moderators attack anyone who even dares utter the words "monopoly" and "Google" in the same sentence is both amusing and sad. How many ongoing investigations are there of Google right now, particularly in Europe? I mean, come on. It's not trolling to point out that Google is friggin' huge.
Or what if Google disabled searches on Lyonnaise de Garantie. Then there would be no search terms, offensive or otherwise.
The trick here is that this is an autosuggest. Google is suggesting, now what that means can vary. I take that to mean google is suggesting that these are things commonly searched together. If you take it to mean 'google is suggesting you should search for' or 'google is suggesting that' then the situation is a bit different.
Google is suggesting a query string, not a matter of truth. In fact, there is no truth value associated with the query; the truth lies within the results of the search.
My interpretation: This is another example of people with limited understanding of the internet attempting to regulate it. We will all suffer as a result. OTOH, as long as they are not filtering results we can still search for "french government has their head up their own ass." They are really lucky I like Bordeaux wines and French cheese and pate de campagne.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Naw... Google will do what they always do... any searches for Lyonnaise de Grantie will prominently dispaly a notice about how many search results are ommitted and link to the court order that explains why. Why would google remove the company from search results and give up a golden opportunity to dish out another lesson on Streisand Effect?
It was called communism, and it failed miserably. That expectation of receiving money for your work was changed for, go work or else.
"There is talk about the failure of socialism, yet where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? Where is the success of capitalism in places where thousands of millions of people live? I believe that the failure of capitalism should be discussed as much as the failure of socialism in a small number of countries. Capitalism failed in more than 100 countries, which now face a truly desperate situation." - Fidel Castro, 1991.
And communism was never tried, not in a large scale. Try to read about its ideas before you make a fool of yourself again, or at least refrain from talking about what you don't understand. And that goes for other topics too, if you have no idea what it is about your uneducated opinion is irrelevant.
If I ran Google I'd blacklist said company. No results for them period, on any search. I'd say "To make sure we comply with the order that no offensive terms ever lead to you, we have removed you from our indexing entirely. This is the only way we can ensure that there is never an offensive term that might result in your company being linked."
They'd quickly find out it is not good for business when you can't be located by the most popular search engine. If they wanted back on I'd demand they sign an indemnity/permission document saying that they agree never to sue us no matter what search terms may end up linking to them.
"There is talk about the failure of socialism, yet where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America?"
He was correct, if you didn't count Japan, Singapore, Mexico, Argentina, Hong Kong or South Korea, which is a round-about way of saying that he was wrong. True, Africa south of Sahara isn't doing great, but that doesn't seem to correlate with economic model, and has more to do with the lack of infrastructure and protection of property rights. But then, quoting a communist despot on the success of capitalism is like quoting a catholic priest on the succes of the gay right movement: Unless you are doing it to ridicule the quotee, you are not doing your argument or your credibilty any favors.