Censorship with Google Instant?

By Gwen on Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - 21:18

I can’t remember life without Google. Honestly.

I know I’m kind of young, but think about it: Google’s search engine was launched in 1997. I don’t think we had a computer with an Internet connection until a couple years later. When I was old enough to understand what the Internet was, Google was already the number one search engine over Yahoo!.

That alone makes me probably unable to think about Google objectively. It’s like trying to think about remote controls objectively. It’s there and I don’t know how life was before it existed. Google has answers to anything I might want to know, it offers results in different languages, it knows the routes to my friends’ houses even when I’ve never seen the neighborhood before, it can translate from Finnish. And although I do know someone who can do that too, Finnish is something I will never learn, and don’t have to: Google already knows it.

Now Google has added a new function you may have already noticed, Google Instant. When you search for something from Google’s search engine page – not from the toolbar you may or may not have in your browser – it ‘guesses’ what you are trying to search for. Not only do the search suggestions change according to what you’ve typed, the results change with it below the search field.

For instance, in my Swedish language version of Google, when I start a word with the letter ‘a’, the top suggestion is the website of newspaper Aftonbladet, even though I might actually be looking for something in Amsterdam. It is only after I’ve typed ‘Amst’, that it realizes I’m not looking for Swedish newspapers or job agencies. Even then the first result after plain ‘Amsterdam’ is ‘Amsterdam airport’. When I search for the city I grew up in, Maastricht, I go through instant messaging service MSN Sverige (specifically the Swedish language MSN), the city of Malmö, and only after that it suggests Maastricht, the Swedish word for the Treaty of Maastricht, and something Finnish called 'Maaseudun tulevaisuus', which on closer inspection seems to be a news source as well.

This makes sense: I have told Google I want my search results in Swedish, so it treats me more or less like a Swedish person. I say ‘more or less’ because I think Google’s search results are a mixture of local relevant results (based on your IP address) and the more high-profile international results, for which it doesn’t pay attention to the language you are searching in. For instance, I think it doesn’t matter where you are for a website like IMDb.com to pop up. At the same time, when I find myself searching for lyrics of dialect songs (which I swear happens only once a year during Carnival) I am never able to track those down, because the sites I would find them on are so obscure nobody ever visits them, and instead I am directed to loads of Dutch sites with words on them that vaguely resemble my search terms.

All of this sounds rather handy; it is like Remote Control 2.0. I don’t need to surf channels endlessly until I find out about that one movie on some Belgian channel I never normally watch: my remote knows the things I would like to find. No more talk shows, no more talent shows, never any scary detectives, only the fun ones.

Alas, there’s a drawback to this new search feature. No matter how instant it is, sometimes you hit a wall and the search results become blank. 'Press Enter to search', it will say. For some words, this can be justifiably put in the list of ‘I Don’t Want My Boss To See These Search Results’. Other words are just plain weird, and other words include 'lesbian' and 'bisexual'.