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In Germany, Offensive Autocomplete Is No Laughing Matter

itwbennett writes "We've all had a chuckle over Google's autocomplete results for various search queries. But one German businessman had a less funny experience when he searched for his name on Google.de: The autocomplete suggested search terms where his name was tied with 'Scientology' and 'fraud' (in German, of course). This was back in 2010. In 2012, a German court ruled that the autocomplete terms did not infringe the plaintiff's privacy. Now, a year later, the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe has overturned that ruling and ordered that Google remove offensive search suggestions when notified."

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  1. Re:Good to know by joh · · Score: 4, Informative

    If a lot of people are entering the search query "Bob Somelastname pedophile" then Google autocomplete will add the word "pedophile" whenever someone types "Bob Somelastname". Google is not trying to be offensive, its just an algorithm that is based on the most common searches.

    Sorry, but no. Google already filters out LOTS of things, among them many words related to porn and many things Google doesn't like to see connected to its name if you start to type "Google". Nobody knows what else they filter here. Basically Google is redacting its auto-completion heavily already.

    If this were indeed a plain algorithm I would tend to agree with you. But it isn't.