It is insane that google did that in the first place. The amount of censorship creeping into google the last few years is rather disappointing.<p>We need more competition in search and technology. Google would never have done this when they were fighting yahoo, excite, altavista and dozens of other search engines for their survival.<p>Now that they are a near monopoly, they are playing "political police man"?<p>There is too much politics seeping into tech.<p>Google should be displaying results that the user wants, not what they want the user to see.
I'm actually in support of this. It's very important to separate content providers from entities that make things more discoverable. Google's job is to help me find what I'm looking for, not to decide what I can or cannot buy. I see this analogous to Cloudflare not supporting a site because they don't agree with the content.
We know where it starts. Where does it end? What business value are such search filters achieving for Google?<p>Wouldn't that kind of action lead to a growing number of users losing trust in their search results? e.g. if they manipulate the outcome of searches for a kind of object which one has a right to purchase and keep; would they do the same for certain ideas which one has a right to express and read; or for sets of people which one has a right to vote for?
Followup on an earlier discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16474102" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16474102</a><p>Earlier today it was noticed that Google Shopping was filtering all searches containing the string "gun" (and various other firearm-related terms). This led to some amusing issues where search terms like "burgundy" were being blocked as well. As the day went on, the filter first was adapted to not apply to phrases that were part of words, but was still being applied to the word "gun" in isolation. As of an hour or so ago, it looks like the filter has been disabled. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future and if there will be any official statement from Google.