Latest Target In War On Drugs: Google Autocomplete 154
netbuzz writes "The National Association of Attorneys General met in Boston this week and one panel focused on the 'safe harbor' provision of 1996 Communications Decency Act. Within that broader discussion, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood cited the autocomplete feature in Google search as evidence the company has more control over content than it contends. 'We know they manipulate the autocomplete feature,' Hood said, with his point being that there should be more such manipulation, not less. His primary example: a search on 'prescription drugs online' presents an autocomplete suggestion of 'prescription drugs online without a prescription.'"
Danger! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:wasteful (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they believe that Google should be at the front line of essentially censoring the internet to only return things they feel are 'acceptable'.
The government can't censor you (yet), but if they can strong-arm a company into doing it for them, it must be OK, right?
Re:Danger! (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe he's angry about his own autocomplete results,
They should know by now (Score:5, Insightful)
Drugs will... (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical politics.
Re:He's a moron (Score:5, Insightful)
Prohibition is bad policy. There's no "at least he's" when he's implementing bad policy. The right thing to do is advocate against bad policy. If he can't do that as AG, then he should quit. Keeping his job and implementing bad policy should earn him nothing but contempt.
Autostop reading (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:but...that's...not how it works... (Score:5, Insightful)
But "think of the children" ! Oh, and obviously anyone using a search query like that is probably up to no good (probably looking for illicit drugs)...maybe Google should start profiling the people who search with these kinds of queries, and tip off law enforcement, so we can have a safer society and stuff. You know, just send a copy of that person's search history for the last month and GPS location to a nearby police station, and the police will have a look around the premises for anything incriminating. To help bootstrap the process, right? Because that's the society we live...one that's constantly looking for someone to thump, by any means.
Oh, to live on a different plane of existence where stupidity like this does not exist.
Re:google this (Score:4, Insightful)
Theres my daily dose of laughter and loss of faith in humanity,
One of my suggestions was "attorneys are doctors"!
The funny one was "attorneys aren't us" (a play on alcho annonomous)
Re:google this (Score:5, Insightful)
Attorneys are ... :)
Welcome to the world of crowd sourced search trends, and self fulfilling prophesies.
The truth is autocomplete isn't manipulated, its crowd sourced in real time. No conspiracy, no secret room full of minions trained to push an agenda. Just statistical weighting of what hundreds of thousands of people are searching for. If you don't like the results blame the users, because, in fact, that is exactly the source.
Why is this so hard for politicians (and anyone else with an ax to grind) to understand. You read about people suing google all over the world for the same thing, (and mostly losing except in France).
.
Re:Yeah, he's an idiot. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, somebody teach this idiot how incredibly difficult it is to adjust data retrieval algorithms is*, especially on Google's scale.
Actually, the algorithms adjust themselves, in real time, all the time, based on trending searches.
That is why they are so successful. They are crowd sourced.
Everyone thinks they are so unique and individual and different from everybody else. They are totally shocked to find out they have exactly the same thought patterns as a large percentage of other people. I often see something on TV, reach for my tablet and google a couple words, only to have auto complete suggest almost exactly the next few words I was going to enter. 60 million other viewers saw the same thing, and decided to do the same search, and at least half are faster than I am. Its worked this way forever, and without it I'd still be clueless about who Amanda Witherspoon is [ytimg.com].
Re:He's a moron (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:He's a moron (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps the best way to get society to demand the war on drugs end is to prosecute the middle and upper class like we do the lower class
If you could do that, it would solve most of our problems. The whole point of government is to protect the weak from the strong, but in practice it protects the strong from the weak.