Google Fined In France Over Autocomplete

[engine]

Google Fined In France Over Autocomplete [blogs.wsj.com]

A French court fined Google $65,000 because the search engine’s autocomplete function prompts the French word for crook when users type the name of a certain company.

Lyonnaise de Garantie, an insurance company, said staffers at Google should have monitored linked words better.

Google had argued that it was not liable since the word, added under Google Suggest, was the result of an automatic algorithm and did not come from human thought.

Earlier story
Google And Irish Hotel Settle 'Autocomplete' Lawsuit [webmasterworld.com]

[lucy24]

A French court fined Google $65,000

"Bill, pass me a handful of change willya?"

This is very apposite for me because last night (really) I was trying g###'s free translator on the iPad

:: detour here to confirm that it is a google product, although it only says so in the tiniest of microprint ::

It professes to auto-detect the source language with no option of telling it explicitly. (For some reason it does not insist on reading your mind w/r/t the target language.) This leads to the weird effect of singular "rat" and plural "rats" coming out as entirely different words. It assumes the first is the German Rat.

No autocompletion involved ;)