tedster - 6:45 pm on Sep 11, 2010 (gmt 0)

From what I see, a major overhaul of Search Suggestions occurred just a few days before Google Instant Search was launched. All kinds of negative words (sucks, hate, scandal, scam, ripoff, etc) were removed from Suggestions except for situations like Goldman-Sachs where there is a documented scandal.

This was a much needed change. Previously, Search Suggestions were based heavily on search frequency alone - and many people routinely add a negative word to a company name just as a way of doing research.

The side effect was, up to now, an unintentional defamation against various organizations and companies via Search Suggestions who had no online negative reports. In fact, Google recently lost a judicial decision in France based on such defamation.

But having Instant Search throw those Suggestions at people would have been over the top, especially when there were almost zero results. Anyone who wants to do "scam" search can still do it, but they usually need to type in the complete query and complete an old-style search by pressing Enter.