In March 2009, Google rolled out its Suggest feature across all the different Google domains. This means that 100% of Google users would see a dropdown of suggestions for search terms as they type. For me this event probably marks the hump of Where Google Really Started To Go Wrong. Forget steering people towards potential searches (or potentially steering them off course providing a sense of distraction), the main controversies have been in what suggestions are (and aren’t) offered.
Controversy #1 (now fixed):
Controversy #2 (still live). In fact search for any major show, movie or software and Google will suggest you look for a torrent of said show, movie or software. And it’s not some bold anti-copyright stance either.
Controversy #3 (still live). This one I discovered myself, but based on similar forms of sexism eg. filtering clitoris but not penis from safe search and rejecting ads for cougar sites for being non family friendly while accepting sugar daddy sites and having similar issues within Google Instant. Anyway, here it is, apparently pornographic searches don’t come up in Google Suggest and they think anything to do with lesbians must be about pr0n:
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