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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

>Google has banned the term “Kodi” from its autocomplete feature, meaning those who look for information on the set-top box will have to type out the full term in order to search, as reported by TorrentFreak.

>While Kodi is a legal set-top box for streaming, it supports a myriad of third-party add-ons that provide access to pirated media.

Kodi is not a "set-top box". Kodi is software. A set-top box might be pre-loaded with Kodi, but it is not Kodi, anymore than a phone is an "Android". As far as I'm aware, the Kodi team doesn't even sell or officially endorse any pre-loaded hardware set-top box.

This sort of mangling is disappointing from a tech-focused news outlet like The Verge. It also reinforces the implicit association between Kodi and piracy, which is the very thing that caused Google to remove Kodi from search results in the first place.

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> This sort of mangling is disappointing from a tech-focused news outlet like The Verge. It also reinforces the implicit association between Kodi and piracy, which is the very thing that caused Google to remove Kodi from search results in the first place.

This sort of mangling is exactly how exaggerated misrepresented news gets spread. Google didn't remove Kodi from their search results. You can type Kodi and it's the first thing that pops up.

You can type home theater software and get Kodi in the search results, or open source media player and get Kodi.

All they did is remove Kodi from being autocompleted. It still even comes up for autosuggestion.

Right, but... imo google can fuck right off. I’m really not sure who wants corporate interests nudging them like this.

Google is allowed to curate thisr autocomplete to remove links to 6degree piracy topics, and even promote a candidate by removing negative results like they did for Clinton - and I’m allowed to consider them actually-evil for doing so.

Yep. Previously it seemed like they valued their search's integrity over everything else, but they must be so comfortable with their power now that they're not really worried anymore. It's not easy to prove either, so hard to regulate. I wish we could forbid it and it might be something the EU may try in the next few years, but it'd likely involve an external audit of the holiest systems - something they would likely fight against hard.

What individual users can do in the mean time is using independent, less corporate services: DuckDuckGo comes to mind.

It is however hard to ignore that Google really has a monopoly on good search (well, decliningly so for me). Maybe we should also start to use Bing to fuel competition.

It reduces the traffic, when everything Kodi’s doing is completely legal.

> very thing that caused Google to remove Kodi from search results in the first place

The irony is that Google has made far more money off of "piracy" than Kodi.

The sad thing is that a certain select set of companies gets special privileges while open source endeavors like Kodi get shafted.

If Kodi had a lot of private consumer data to trade for legal immunities it would be a different story.

Isn’t it funny that Google has likely been one of the biggest beneficiaries of illegal content on the internet? Just think how many YT and Google searches end with “full movie” or “torrent.”

> Kodi is not a "set-top box". Kodi is software.

They issued a correction:

Correction March 30th, 2018, 1:20AM ET: Article updated to be clear that Kodi is software sometimes loaded onto set-top-boxes, not a set-top box.

Also this is the original source article that The Verge have re-heated:

https://torrentfreak.com/google-adds-kodi-to-autocomplete-pi...

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