Censorship for an Instant

Google’s new Instant service which starts filtering your search results immediately without you having to hit Enter is a curious offering. I’d been using the old autocomplete facility since beta days and thought it was great for saving a bit of typing and also for either showing similar search results that may or may not be relevant, or search terms I hadn’t thought of.

What has always puzzled me about Google — moreso now — is the half-censorship they apply to the results, irrespective of my SafeSearch preference. Their help document explains:

… autocomplete excludes certain terms related to pornography, violence and hate speech

Thus if I type any of the following into Google I get no results unless I press Enter:

• Fuck
• Tosser
• Cocaine
• Limey
• Rape
• Towelhead (which is a book and a 2007 film)
• Flaps (?!)

Bizarrely though, if I type cocai I get a Wikipedia result for ‘cocaine’ as the top link and if I add an ‘n’ Google themselves helpfully suggest “Did you mean cocaine?” But when I add the final ‘e’ all the results disappear.

In contrast, with the following words I see results before I hit the magic Enter:

• Coke
• Ecstasy
• Honky
• Porch Monkey
• Gook
• Coon

And if I type:

• Bum
• Prostitute
• Drugs
• Stabbing

I not only get links back, I get pictures and/or videos as well.

Clearly Google are under pressure from certain places to censor particular terms but they’re not very consistent about it. I say why bother if the full list is one keystroke away and I’ve indicated in my preferences that I’m man enough to take whatever it throws at me.