Posts About ‘Autocomplete’

Google loses autocomplete case: cannot “suggest” Italian company is a fraud

truffa-google-it

In Milan, Italy, Google has lost a case which was started against them by an Italian businessman who was ‘suggested’ to be a fraud or conman when searchers looked for his company name in Google.

The autocomplete function from Google suggested that the company they were looking for was truffatore (“con man”) and truffa (“fraud”).

Google tried to “get out” of the claim by stating they are a hosting provider. That way they would be falling under the protection of the E-Commerce Directive’s safe harbour provisions. That protects hosting providers from claims like this. The court however felt the autocomplete function has nothing to do with hosting and was a production from Google. (more…)

Google’s April fools jokes: Gmail motion, Teleport Search and a Google Autocompleter

GMail-motion

When Google launched +1 last week there were several people out there who believed it was an early version of Google’s April Fools joke. After all, every year Google tends to do one or more pranks to fool the community.

+1 didn’t turn out to be the joke, but on April Fools Day Google made up for that with several jokes. They introduced Gmail Motion, “a new way to communicate” with Gmail: controlling Gmail with your body. Based on that technology they supposedly built lots of new products in no time, with Google Teleport Search (in Chinese only) being my personal favorite. But they also showed us YouTube 1911 and they were hiring Google Autocompleter. Maybe not all as believable as possible, but sure a few you can at least laugh a little bit about. An overview. (more…)