Google Censorship

Google censorship - two words that should send shivers down your spine.

So many people trust Google with their access to information. While, technically, Google doesn't host much of its own information, it definitely controls what information on the web you know about.

It's a gatekeeper of sorts.

There are of course dozens of gates right next to Google's. There's DuckDuckGo. There's IxQuick, which even offers to provide its very own proxy connection to any website to improve your anonymity.

But people are hell-bent on continuing their support for Google's search engine.

Now, there used to be a time when this was justified - Google simply had the best search results of any competitor - but they've just shot themselves in the foot.

GOOGLE CENSORSHIP

As I've now found out, Google has been censoring its instant search results for almost two years. Maybe I'm just late to the party, but check this out:

uTorrent is a perfectly legal piece of software. The censorship is so blatant that until you type in the last letter, it won't appear in the instant search results. Or how about this:

Now, BitTorrent is just a file transfer protocol. Huge sections of the web use the BitTorrent protocol to share completely legal content. For example, the Mises Institute has put up an archive of its book and journal collections using torrents. Any author may put up their own work as a torrent, and that's entirely legal.

Even more absurd is this:

Does that seem ridiculous yet?

Now the fact that this has been going on for almost two years, and that Google still hasn't changed their asinine censorship policy, is for me the final nail in the coffin. I will no longer use Google's search engine, at all. I've already set my default search engine to DuckDuckGo, but I won't even use Google's image search. Bing will do just fine.

In the end, the managers of these companies only understand the bottom line, and if people don't start boycotting their products when they enact censorship, then they have absolutely no incentive to change their censorship policies.

Vote with your searches, folks!