Google-search – Is it possible to turn off Google Search’s word filter

google-search

I've noticed that search suggestions (such as "marijuana", "The Pirate Bay", and various "swear words") are now being censored, i.e., not appearing in search suggestions despite being popular queries. Whenever I start typing the word "marijuana", the only search suggestion that I see is "marijuana's effects on the brain."

I haven't seen any option on Google Search that would allow users to turn off this word filter. Is there any way to work around this problem?

Best Answer

I'm not sure why this is a "problem".

Google was "asked" by the MPAA and RIAA to prevent piracy-related terms from showing up in autocomplete and they agreed to do so. Google is not required to show any search suggestions for any particular search term. If you don't like that, you can go use a less-popular search engine, like Bing, that hasn't yet been asked to implement such restrictions.
Google has also chosen to hide various terms that are widely considered "NSFW" (Not Safe For Work) from the search suggestions. That way, you can use Google at work without having to worry about what your boss will see on your screen when he comes up behind you.

Note that if you purposely search for these any terms that do not show up in the suggestion list, you will still find them. Google is not censoring your search results.

Related Solutions

Google-search – Does word order matter for Google Search

Word order does affect your search results. For example, try the following two searches and observe the differences:

wind turbine energy

energy turbine wind

Not only the number of results but also the order of mutual results are different. Note that if you put your search terms in quotation marks, Google looks for the exact sequential words. For example:

"wind turbine energy"

This kind of search will, of course, lead to less number of results.

Google-search – How to turn off Google’s page preview in search

If you don't mind killing off all other Javascript features, the most reliable way is to just disallow all Javascript for the search page.

No thanks to Google using one domain for so many of its services, you can't do that with NoScript's base functionality, but you can with NoScript's ABE (Application Boundaries Enforcer) subsystem.

Here's a little ABE rule I wrote to kill Google Instant which also does what you want:

Site ^https://encrypted.google.com/(s|search)(\?.*|$)
Deny INC(SCRIPT,XHR)
Sandbox

Further details on this SuperUser answer I wrote earlier:

https://superuser.com/questions/260475/how-to-make-google-search-scriptless-with-noscript-adblock/325939#325939

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Google-search – Does word order matter for Google Search

Google-search – How to turn off Google’s page preview in search

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