Will Google be forced to censor results?
An interesting situation is going on with Google Suggest--a software company named ServersCheck is suing Google for suggesting sites that provide cracks for their software's copyright protection scheme.
Since Google Suggest basically works by returning the most popular search results, it's really not promoting software cracks, the cracks just happen to be what a lot of people are looking for, so Google's suggesting them. Hence what the ServersCheck is really doing is suing to make Google filter its search results to what they deem appropriate.
What will happen when large masses of people popularize something that isn't legal? Allowing people to determine what's important is one of the basic tenets of Web 2.0, and if software companies begin filtering results I imagine the whole idea will lose a lot of its punch.
