That would be a restriction of freedom of speech and Internet Freedom for blacklisting magnet urls.
Linux Distro excuse comes to mind.
A cynical person might say that the intent would also further kill free content creators, restricting the supply of content; consumers then see only paid content.
Wow, I didn't see this before. I can understand filtering certain terms for court requests, but voluntarily? It looks like Google is attacking distribution methods of content with such broad filtering. Probably to make compromises with the anti-Internet activists. Now judges can interpret it to mean that Google can happily censor any results for certain words as it has been done in other anti-Internet regimes. What scumbags all round.
Note that this isn't filtering the terms for search, just filtering them for auto-complete. As in, if I type "lord of the rings" it won't suggest "lord of the rings torrent" even if that is the most common or one of the most common searches beginning with "lord of the rings."
If you actually type "lord of the rings torrent" and hit return, Google will still do that search and return relevant results.
They are doing this because for many pieces of popular media, the torrent search was fairly high in the list of most popular searches, and they don't want to be seen as suggesting that you download the torrent. Likewise, they won't autocomplete obscene or porn related terms, but will still do searches for them.
There is a difference between banning a term entirely from their search engine, and deciding that it's not something that you want to suggest to people who haven't requested it, to avoid suggesting illegal acts, avoid legal trouble, avoid offending people, or the like.
"This is something we looked at and thought we could make some narrow and relatively easy changes to our Autocomplete algorithm that could make a positive difference, Cano added."
They believe in filtering broad innocent terms in them as a solution to copyright infringement rather than saying "No no, we can't filter broad terms, especially innocent uses of it. Not only does the language evolve, but the infringers can adopt innocent names like congress:<link to song>. We need to intelligently handle copyright infringement without hurting access to legitimate websites."
It looks like part of doing SEO now is to be aware of avoiding broad innocent terms. I hope the unaware people don't get caught in Google's broad autocomplete filter.
I can't see that working - any more than giving your DVD protection scheme the same acronym as a common file format (CSS) to prevent people finding ways to defeat it.
My point was only that it couldn't be censored in the same way - if Google would remove Apple from suggest, it would clearly be viewed as a monopolistic/anti-competitive action.
Linux Distro excuse comes to mind.
A cynical person might say that the intent would also further kill free content creators, restricting the supply of content; consumers then see only paid content.