9 ms·

Google Shopping now returns no results for searches containing “gun”

111 points by dictum 9y ago

dictum 9y ago
Also, queries containing "revolver": https://www.google.com/search?output=search&tbm=shop&q=beatles+revolver https://www.google.com/search?output=search&tbm=shop&q=beatl...
- gort 9y ago
  And "rifle", I think. You can't even do searches like "shogun" (famous novel) or "begun".
- tudorw 9y ago
  and yet, https://www.google.co.uk/search?dcr=0&tbm=shop&ei=VHqVWp-WL4zikgWpv72YAg&q=nuclear+bomb https://www.google.co.uk/search?dcr=0&tbm=shop&ei=VHqVWp-WL4...
Girlang 9y ago
Glue gun?
smsm42 9y ago
Searched right now, got tons of toy guns, not real guns so far - but I wouldn't shop for a real one on Google Shopping anyway, don't think so.
- smsm42 9y ago
  Interestingly, I get a lot of results for 1911 (none seem to be actual firing guns, despite pictures), but nothing for Glock or Colt. Funny thing is the 1911 results have a lot of "Colt" words in the title, so it's an obvious block, and a pretty stupid one (as they all are) at that.
dep_b 9y ago
I'm actually not getting any results from any query period. Apparently Google realized online shopping is virtually non-existent in my country and just gave up? https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&output=search&tbm=shop&q=iphone&oq=iphone&gs_l=products-cc.3...25539.25977.0.26072.6.5.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0....0...1ac.1.64.products-cc..6.0.0....0.5pfbC6elbRg https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&output=search&tbm=shop&q... "Your search - iphone - did not match any shopping results."
- giarc 9y ago
  I get ten pages of results using your link.
  - dep_b 9y ago
    That's strange. Apparently nothing is spidered in my country and I can't find an easy way to switch countries. A lot of people shop abroad. Google Shopping is a "good enough" experience for the end user, ready to be shoved in your face when you are searching for links to websites that contain your search query.
qubex 9y ago
Yeah, which is kind of annoying... I’m European and shed no tears whatsoever for the supposed loss of precious “second amendment” rights (never had such a thing, never wanted such a thing), but I work in the paint business where we use electrostatic guns to apply powder coatings... and those have all disappeared (as has “electron gun” of the cathode ray tube variety), all of which is quite annoying collateral damage.
- SerLava 9y ago
  Oh lord. This is the most technologically sophisticated company in the world. And they just... wow.
  - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    I didn't think this could be accurate. I went to Google Shopping myself and searched for "Glue Gun"... no results, holy shit.
    - michaelbrooks 9y ago
      Yup, same for "water gun" someone at Google needs their head checking. This is incredible on so many levels.
  - dictum 9y ago
    There's an in-house precedent too: https://web.archive.org/web/20110616041821/http://news.cnet.com/2100-1032_3-5198125.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110616041821/http://news.cnet....
    - glibgil 9y ago
      > Matt Cutts, the Google engineer who designed SafeSearch four years ago, said his algorithm looks for a "relatively small" number of trigger words in a Web page's address. If one of those words appears, the SafeSearch algorithm puts the address on a block list and does not take the next step of evaluating the content of the site. "We try to find the best trade-off of precision, recall and safety," Cutts said. "People who opt in to SafeSearch are mostly OK with us being on the conservative side." Matt “Cutts” your traffic since 2000. Though he’s not at Google anymore he was always emblematic of the stop-doing-that-on-my-site-(that-I-crawled-the-internet-to-put-you-on) culture at Google. Always taking a machete to a scalpel fight and always to the customer facing side first and never to the ingest and analysis side
tombert 9y ago
I understand why they did this, but I think this might be a bit too broad. There are plenty of things that I might buy that have the word "Gun" that are not directly related to weapons; my favorite XBox game is named "Gun", there is a Gregory Peck movie I like called "The Guns of Navarone", and there's the aforementioned "Guns, Germs, and Steel".
- s_ngularity 9y ago
  You can't even search "burgundy dress" now. This is a totally ridiculous "solution"
- ignoramceisblis 9y ago
  The fact that you > think > this might > be a bit > too broad Is to reveal the sorry state of affairs in, at least, our political discourse. Worse so, you're effectively part of the problem which allows these organizations to become so powerful. You always need checks and balances. You always need to be vigilant. You always need to act.
  - tombert 9y ago
    Umm, what the hell are you talking about? Which organizations? The NRA or Google? I'm not even disputing that I'm part of the problem, but I would like you to elaborate on what you think this problem actually is.
    - ignoramceisblis 9y ago
      I find it hard to believe that anyone would seriously compare a non-profit membership organization whose mission includes educating American citizens of responsible gun ownership and defending citizens' second amendment rights, to a global for-profit corporation with over 100 billion USD in annual revenue, directly affecting hundreds of millions of lives every day, with the power to promote or censor search results, advertisements, and more, and consequently shape what people think. Surely the former does not have sufficient power to positively shape how it's presented by major media corporations, and it often takes the blame when those corporations distribute stories of gun violence--events which, when the intensity of media attention is brought to them, we can all point to and feel visceral reactions to. But it's obvious that the political whims of the latter (Google) can be, and has been, carried out at a massive scale with great(er) efficiency and little(r) checks or balances. The fact that we have not yet developed and distributed concise-enough language to discuss the monumental impact of entities like Google is a sign that there is a problem we are not devoting enough energy to.
calibas 9y ago
Not that I'm pro-gun, but I'd much prefer that Google stay out of politics. The potential for abuse is enormous.
- golemotron 9y ago
  It's too late. They've chosen that bed. Now they'll have to lie in it.
- sp332 9y ago
  Google is very political, to begin with. And if they're afraid that their product might be involved in getting people killed, it makes sense to change the product. You don't have to be too "political" to make that decision.
  - jboggan 9y ago
    If you can't find results for "paint guns" then it was clearly a ham-handed political change and not something driven or even vetted by engineering. Also, last I checked, Google returns results for "body disposal", "Anarchist's Cookbook", and a host of information useful for doing harm to other human beings. I don't see how that makes them complicit in anything. Maybe they should change their mission statement: "To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, unless it's this month's politically sensitive topic trending on Twitter."
    - sp332 9y ago
      True, the way they've implemented this seems calculated to cause a splash. I expect they'll roll out a more nuanced version after the attention passes.
      - jboggan 9y ago
        I don't think it was calculated at all. It's highly likely this was just a few lines adding "gun/rifle/revolver/etc." to the blacklist of forbidden search terms for that service. It's the same list containing terms like "child porn" and as long as one of the file owners approves the CL it goes into production immediately. I really doubt this went through a regular launch process and had an Ariane bit flipped as part of a proper review.
sonofgod 9y ago
Also "ar 15", unsuprisingly.
joeblow9999 9y ago
That'll solve the problem!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
PhearTheCeal 9y ago
I can't even search for the word "burgundy", which is quite a nice color.
- JorgeGT 9y ago
  Wait, so even Google engineers are terrible at regexp-ing? I now feel less bad about myself.
dsl 9y ago
Well that explains why I couldn't find a replacement Staple Gun this morning. I actually thought Google Shopping had broken terribly.
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  And apparently it is broken terribly.
ravenstine 9y ago
Apparently this is not terribly sophisticated. https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&ei=q3uVWtOfMM-4jwPqwZoI&q=guhns+germs+and+steel&oq=guhns+germs+and+steel&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i13k1l3.1217.1217.0.1789.1.1.0.0.0.0.209.209.2-1.1.0....0...1c.2.64.psy-ab..0.1.208....0.pEqtr6g99y4 https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&ei=q3uVWtOfMM-4jwPqwZ... And more generally: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&ei=rnuVWpLsIJKEjwP8uqrICg&q=guhns&oq=guhns&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i13k1l10.26638.26638.0.26870.1.1.0.0.0.0.84.84.1.1.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.1.84....0.vlsuaQD7-ME https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&ei=rnuVWpLsIJKEjwP8uq... So it would seem they blocked a direct result but not suggested results.
- eterm 9y ago
  That's unbelievably unsophisticated. That combined with not using their vast ML resources to understand when something isn't a firearm (e.g. glue gun) makes me wonder how this feature has come about.
  - tinalumfoil 9y ago
    Is it possible this was just a mistake or maybe a rogue employee? I can't imagine Google allowing someone of this low competence to make changes to search.
    - eterm 9y ago
      I can't imagine a single developer would have the power to make this change either? I guess it's possible that filtering has existed for a long time for very specific queries and 'gun' was added to a list. It seems weird that this feature could be put live in this state getting passed QA though. That makes me worried what other changes could get live without much oversight.
      - gfodor 9y ago
        For an ecommerce site such as Google Shopping it goes beyond QA -- incremental rollouts should have triggered alerts noting this as causing a drop in recall (to effectively zero) for a large category of high traffic queries that convert (presumably there are some, like "nerf gun" or "glue gun", given that "gun" is an extremely common term that has high purchase intent for non-weapons) and it should have been prevented from being deployed by automation. Presumably if they are doing things correctly there are probably several overrides that needed to be enabled to let this change out. Or, they're not doing things correctly. In nearly any other situation, automated systems would recognize "change goes out -> large number of queries suddenly return zero results" as a major catastrophic bug and prevent it from being deployed.
sonofgod 9y ago
Oh, and searches for "revolvor" and "gu n" work just fine. So only people with bad spelling will be able to buy guns...
- 13of40 9y ago
  To their credit, if you type in "holds six magazines" to Google shopping they still show a couple of magazine racks before the tactical vests.
5555624 9y ago
Like the title states, it's only "Shopping" and while it can be more specific than "gun" -- for example, "AR-15" will not result in any "Shopping" results -- "AR-15" under "All" will give results for places to purchase an AR-15.
cwisecarver 9y ago
Hooray! Now just search for firearms and get the same results.
johnstew 9y ago
I like the initiative just not sure about the execution. I just search "glue gun" and got nothing. Guess that's fine. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ISNIT 9y ago
Damn... I should've bought my "gunge" before today. Now I'll have to use Yahoo!
jasonkostempski 9y ago
Good thing for Guns N' Roses that no one actually uses Google Shopping.
gfodor 9y ago
This "if (q.contains('gun')) return null;" approach is such a ham-fisted hack that causes such collateral damage that anyone who thought Google can be trusted anymore to responsibly wield their power over human commerce and thought and not act impulsively based on political whims should reconsider their position. Even if it is a mistake this kind of change should never be possible to ship. And if it's not a mistake, then I don't know what to say.
- PhearTheCeal 9y ago
  They did a similar thing with "confederate flag" not that long ago. I'm convinced Google Shopping is more for political PR than an actual place where anyone shops (Google probably knows this so doesn't care if they break their service to virtue signal)
  - gfodor 9y ago
    Google is supposed to be the data driven organization that changes things in a way that will minimize collateral damage. Even if Google Shopping doesn't draw much traffic in relative terms, at Google scale I'm sure it provides meaningful revenue to all sorts of companies that have products that include the term "gun" that do not include weapons. To make such a change and not methodically try to reduce the blast radius for these people effectively proves that whoever is in charge over there is not rolling out changes to search algorithms in the way Google is supposed to be famous for. I worked on search algorithms for an ecommerce site that would kill for the kinds of traffic Google Shopping probably gets, and the idea that this would ever pass code review is laughable because of all of the blatantly obvious negative effects it would have on recall. At the very least, you would whitelist bigrams in query logs that go along with "gun" that do not include weapons. This is a truly amateur move, several steps away from what I would consider acceptable from the worlds premier search organization. I would fail a student taking an information retrieval course on a question if they provided this as a solution to removing a category of products from a search engine.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  Google: "Okay, here's a bunch of technical interview hoops you have to jump through." Candidate: "Hey remember when you returned zero results for any query containing gun?"
_ph_ 9y ago
I am horrified. Whatever ones oppinion about gun control might be, and whether it is ok to remove actual guns from search results, it is absolutely horrible that a company like Google would consider it reasonable to build a filter just around the three letters "gun" in the search text.
sgurajada 9y ago
no results for `toy guns` too
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
DocTomoe 9y ago
This just smells of a Scunthorpe problem. What about a nice DVD of Gunsmith Cats, or a watch with gunmetal finish, or maybe a burgundy sweater?
sfcoder25 9y ago
Velvet Revolver too. All that money into DeepMind and this is the best they can do?
me551ah 9y ago
Does anyone actually use Google Shopping? I personally don't know anyone who does.
- stronglikedan 9y ago
  I do every time I shop. It's (was) the easiest price comparison for general products (that I know of). This is certainly a huge disappointment. I don't think I would have searched out an alternative anytime soon had this not happened.
DanAndersen 9y ago
I'm trying to figure out Google's angle here. Is this just a dumb legal-initiated move to shelter Google from culpability for any future gun crimes committed with guns purchased after looking at Google Shopping? Is this an attempt to shield against bad PR on social media from "supporting those evil gun sellers"? Or is this an attempt by Google to throw their weight around for ideological reasons, to try to make gun purchasing as much as a pariah as the Confederate flag became after Dylan Roof (when major online retailers did the same censoring)? Whatever the case, it's definitely making breaking up Google look a lot more appealing. Encourage your friends and family to get off of Google and use something like DuckDuckGo instead. For too many people, "Google = Internet", and it's becoming increasingly clear that that mindset will leave people vulnerable to inhabiting only a small curated collection of approved mindsets.
- cft 9y ago
  Virtue signaling at the highest corporate levels. Must have been approved by Pichai himself. He probably felt insufficient backing to say no (which would have been in the interest of the company) to the aspiring apparatchik that executed this as her career move.
gort 9y ago
I notice this has been pushed down the rankings on the frontpage (it was near the top a few minutes ago). Surely this sort of incompetent implementation of a politically-motivated decision by a major tech company is worthy of our attention? (Exactly how submissions end up at a position other than their natural ranking has always been a bit mysterious to me - should I blame some algorithm thing or malicious actors?)
- Slansitartop 9y ago
  It probably tripped the flamewar detector and/or was flagged (but not to the point of getting killed).
GiorgioG 9y ago
Bravo Google! You've managed to make zero positive impact on your implied corporate stance on "gun control" in the US. Worse, you've managed to degrade non-firearms related queries that contain 'gun.'
nemoniac 9y ago
It does return results containing "guns". If you search for "germs" and "steel", it returns the book "Guns, Germs and Steel". However it does not appear to return results if you search for "guns".
nemoniac 9y ago
Brilliant! A search for "gu n" yields "Did you mean gun" and offers gun related products.
mancerayder 9y ago
"Do no evil" as a marketing ploy, even if they dropped that officially. One person's evil is another person's free speech rights, or ambiguity (forget the 2nd Amendment for a moment). It reminds me a bit of a commercial I saw: in slow motion, people of different races were smiling and holding hands (nevermind that they looked like models, all of them), with some motto about diversity. I think the sun was rising, or setting. A few seconds later: a Nike logo at the bottom. There you have it, folks, that's what happens when politicial discourse is about symbols and words (ideas) and most importantly feelings instead of laws and economic policy.
zestyping 9y ago
Not just for searches containing the word "gun", but even words that contain "gun" as a substring! This returns no results: https://www.google.com/search?q=shogun&tbm=shop https://www.google.com/search?q=shogun&tbm=shop But this misspelled query shows that results for "Shogun" exist: https://www.google.com/search?q=shogon&tbm=shop https://www.google.com/search?q=shogon&tbm=shop Did anybody review or write tests for this changelist?
dhardy 9y ago
It gives results if you do it with spaces... so g u n works... *edit for clarity
kretash 9y ago
I don't understand how such a hacky piece of code made it to production. While water gun returns no results... water gu https://i.imgur.com/3pV73rs.png https://i.imgur.com/3pV73rs.png
gort 9y ago
Actually - do we know if this is new? I found this from 2012, for example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2012/07/05/google-sadly-joins-the-anti-gun-brigade/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2012/07/05/google-... Edit: The Telegraph picked this up just now, saying Google are "looking into" it... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/27/wine-lovers-cannot-buy-burgundy-tipple-google-internet-giant/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/27/wine-lovers-cann...
TYPE_FASTER 9y ago
Wow, this was implemented poorly. Even just adding "gun" to the list of stop words I assume they have would have allowed "burgundy" to keep returning results. String contains boolean condition? Bing Shopping also returns zero results for the search term "gun," but does return results for "gun safe," "burgundy," etc. Yahoo! Shopping seems to have the best compromise, returning relevant results for the search term "gun," like water guns and such, but filtering out "real" guns. The beautiful thing about the internet is we can go to another search engine, like DuckDuckGo. I would rather have Google mess this up and have to go to another site than the federal government attempt to increase regulatory control of internet traffic.
cgb223 9y ago
If only there was some kind of giant innovative cooperation that attracts only the best and brightest talent that could solve this nuanced problem...
dragonwriter 9y ago
Not just “gun”; “pistol” also works. Funny interaction with their matching / DWIM logic is that a query for “water pistol” returns no results, but “water pistil” returns lots of water pistols.
fiveFeet 9y ago
I love it. Thank you, Google! A lot of other tech companies - Paypal, Square, Stripe and Apple pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms. I hope other companies like Amazon, visa, master card will follow your footsteps.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  Google Shopping still shows firearms, it just shows no results for correctly-spelled searches including “gun”, “pistol”, “rifle”. Search for either specific models, or misspellings for “rifel" or “pistil” or “revoler”.
  - fiveFeet 9y ago
    Hopefully they will take care of this loophole as they improve the algorithm.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

111 points by dictum 9y ago

Also, queries containing "revolver": https://www.google.com/search?output=search&tbm=shop&q=beatles+revolver https://www.google.com/search?output=search&tbm=shop&q=beatl...

gort 9y ago
And "rifle", I think. You can't even do searches like "shogun" (famous novel) or "begun".
tudorw 9y ago
and yet, https://www.google.co.uk/search?dcr=0&tbm=shop&ei=VHqVWp-WL4zikgWpv72YAg&q=nuclear+bomb https://www.google.co.uk/search?dcr=0&tbm=shop&ei=VHqVWp-WL4...

Girlang 9y ago

Glue gun?

smsm42 9y ago

Searched right now, got tons of toy guns, not real guns so far - but I wouldn't shop for a real one on Google Shopping anyway, don't think so.

smsm42 9y ago
Interestingly, I get a lot of results for 1911 (none seem to be actual firing guns, despite pictures), but nothing for Glock or Colt. Funny thing is the 1911 results have a lot of "Colt" words in the title, so it's an obvious block, and a pretty stupid one (as they all are) at that.

dep_b 9y ago

I'm actually not getting any results from any query period. Apparently Google realized online shopping is virtually non-existent in my country and just gave up? https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&output=search&tbm=shop&q=iphone&oq=iphone&gs_l=products-cc.3...25539.25977.0.26072.6.5.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0....0...1ac.1.64.products-cc..6.0.0....0.5pfbC6elbRg https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&output=search&tbm=shop&q... "Your search - iphone - did not match any shopping results."

giarc 9y ago
I get ten pages of results using your link.
- dep_b 9y ago
  That's strange. Apparently nothing is spidered in my country and I can't find an easy way to switch countries. A lot of people shop abroad. Google Shopping is a "good enough" experience for the end user, ready to be shoved in your face when you are searching for links to websites that contain your search query.

qubex 9y ago

Yeah, which is kind of annoying... I’m European and shed no tears whatsoever for the supposed loss of precious “second amendment” rights (never had such a thing, never wanted such a thing), but I work in the paint business where we use electrostatic guns to apply powder coatings... and those have all disappeared (as has “electron gun” of the cathode ray tube variety), all of which is quite annoying collateral damage.

SerLava 9y ago
Oh lord. This is the most technologically sophisticated company in the world. And they just... wow.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  I didn't think this could be accurate. I went to Google Shopping myself and searched for "Glue Gun"... no results, holy shit.
  - michaelbrooks 9y ago
    Yup, same for "water gun" someone at Google needs their head checking. This is incredible on so many levels.
- dictum 9y ago
  There's an in-house precedent too: https://web.archive.org/web/20110616041821/http://news.cnet.com/2100-1032_3-5198125.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110616041821/http://news.cnet....
  - glibgil 9y ago
    > Matt Cutts, the Google engineer who designed SafeSearch four years ago, said his algorithm looks for a "relatively small" number of trigger words in a Web page's address. If one of those words appears, the SafeSearch algorithm puts the address on a block list and does not take the next step of evaluating the content of the site. "We try to find the best trade-off of precision, recall and safety," Cutts said. "People who opt in to SafeSearch are mostly OK with us being on the conservative side." Matt “Cutts” your traffic since 2000. Though he’s not at Google anymore he was always emblematic of the stop-doing-that-on-my-site-(that-I-crawled-the-internet-to-put-you-on) culture at Google. Always taking a machete to a scalpel fight and always to the customer facing side first and never to the ingest and analysis side

tombert 9y ago

I understand why they did this, but I think this might be a bit too broad. There are plenty of things that I might buy that have the word "Gun" that are not directly related to weapons; my favorite XBox game is named "Gun", there is a Gregory Peck movie I like called "The Guns of Navarone", and there's the aforementioned "Guns, Germs, and Steel".

s_ngularity 9y ago
You can't even search "burgundy dress" now. This is a totally ridiculous "solution"
ignoramceisblis 9y ago
The fact that you > think > this might > be a bit > too broad Is to reveal the sorry state of affairs in, at least, our political discourse. Worse so, you're effectively part of the problem which allows these organizations to become so powerful. You always need checks and balances. You always need to be vigilant. You always need to act.
- tombert 9y ago
  Umm, what the hell are you talking about? Which organizations? The NRA or Google? I'm not even disputing that I'm part of the problem, but I would like you to elaborate on what you think this problem actually is.
  - ignoramceisblis 9y ago
    I find it hard to believe that anyone would seriously compare a non-profit membership organization whose mission includes educating American citizens of responsible gun ownership and defending citizens' second amendment rights, to a global for-profit corporation with over 100 billion USD in annual revenue, directly affecting hundreds of millions of lives every day, with the power to promote or censor search results, advertisements, and more, and consequently shape what people think. Surely the former does not have sufficient power to positively shape how it's presented by major media corporations, and it often takes the blame when those corporations distribute stories of gun violence--events which, when the intensity of media attention is brought to them, we can all point to and feel visceral reactions to. But it's obvious that the political whims of the latter (Google) can be, and has been, carried out at a massive scale with great(er) efficiency and little(r) checks or balances. The fact that we have not yet developed and distributed concise-enough language to discuss the monumental impact of entities like Google is a sign that there is a problem we are not devoting enough energy to.

calibas 9y ago

Not that I'm pro-gun, but I'd much prefer that Google stay out of politics. The potential for abuse is enormous.

golemotron 9y ago
It's too late. They've chosen that bed. Now they'll have to lie in it.
sp332 9y ago
Google is very political, to begin with. And if they're afraid that their product might be involved in getting people killed, it makes sense to change the product. You don't have to be too "political" to make that decision.
- jboggan 9y ago
  If you can't find results for "paint guns" then it was clearly a ham-handed political change and not something driven or even vetted by engineering. Also, last I checked, Google returns results for "body disposal", "Anarchist's Cookbook", and a host of information useful for doing harm to other human beings. I don't see how that makes them complicit in anything. Maybe they should change their mission statement: "To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, unless it's this month's politically sensitive topic trending on Twitter."
  - sp332 9y ago
    True, the way they've implemented this seems calculated to cause a splash. I expect they'll roll out a more nuanced version after the attention passes.
    - jboggan 9y ago
      I don't think it was calculated at all. It's highly likely this was just a few lines adding "gun/rifle/revolver/etc." to the blacklist of forbidden search terms for that service. It's the same list containing terms like "child porn" and as long as one of the file owners approves the CL it goes into production immediately. I really doubt this went through a regular launch process and had an Ariane bit flipped as part of a proper review.

sonofgod 9y ago

Also "ar 15", unsuprisingly.

joeblow9999 9y ago

That'll solve the problem!

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

PhearTheCeal 9y ago

I can't even search for the word "burgundy", which is quite a nice color.

JorgeGT 9y ago
Wait, so even Google engineers are terrible at regexp-ing? I now feel less bad about myself.

dsl 9y ago

Well that explains why I couldn't find a replacement Staple Gun this morning. I actually thought Google Shopping had broken terribly.

SubiculumCode 9y ago
And apparently it is broken terribly.

ravenstine 9y ago

Apparently this is not terribly sophisticated. https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&ei=q3uVWtOfMM-4jwPqwZoI&q=guhns+germs+and+steel&oq=guhns+germs+and+steel&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i13k1l3.1217.1217.0.1789.1.1.0.0.0.0.209.209.2-1.1.0....0...1c.2.64.psy-ab..0.1.208....0.pEqtr6g99y4 https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&ei=q3uVWtOfMM-4jwPqwZ... And more generally: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&ei=rnuVWpLsIJKEjwP8uqrICg&q=guhns&oq=guhns&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i13k1l10.26638.26638.0.26870.1.1.0.0.0.0.84.84.1.1.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.1.84....0.vlsuaQD7-ME https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&ei=rnuVWpLsIJKEjwP8uq... So it would seem they blocked a direct result but not suggested results.

eterm 9y ago
That's unbelievably unsophisticated. That combined with not using their vast ML resources to understand when something isn't a firearm (e.g. glue gun) makes me wonder how this feature has come about.
- tinalumfoil 9y ago
  Is it possible this was just a mistake or maybe a rogue employee? I can't imagine Google allowing someone of this low competence to make changes to search.
  - eterm 9y ago
    I can't imagine a single developer would have the power to make this change either? I guess it's possible that filtering has existed for a long time for very specific queries and 'gun' was added to a list. It seems weird that this feature could be put live in this state getting passed QA though. That makes me worried what other changes could get live without much oversight.
    - gfodor 9y ago
      For an ecommerce site such as Google Shopping it goes beyond QA -- incremental rollouts should have triggered alerts noting this as causing a drop in recall (to effectively zero) for a large category of high traffic queries that convert (presumably there are some, like "nerf gun" or "glue gun", given that "gun" is an extremely common term that has high purchase intent for non-weapons) and it should have been prevented from being deployed by automation. Presumably if they are doing things correctly there are probably several overrides that needed to be enabled to let this change out. Or, they're not doing things correctly. In nearly any other situation, automated systems would recognize "change goes out -> large number of queries suddenly return zero results" as a major catastrophic bug and prevent it from being deployed.

sonofgod 9y ago

Oh, and searches for "revolvor" and "gu n" work just fine. So only people with bad spelling will be able to buy guns...

13of40 9y ago
To their credit, if you type in "holds six magazines" to Google shopping they still show a couple of magazine racks before the tactical vests.

5555624 9y ago

Like the title states, it's only "Shopping" and while it can be more specific than "gun" -- for example, "AR-15" will not result in any "Shopping" results -- "AR-15" under "All" will give results for places to purchase an AR-15.

cwisecarver 9y ago

Hooray! Now just search for firearms and get the same results.

johnstew 9y ago

I like the initiative just not sure about the execution. I just search "glue gun" and got nothing. Guess that's fine. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ISNIT 9y ago

Damn... I should've bought my "gunge" before today. Now I'll have to use Yahoo!

jasonkostempski 9y ago

Good thing for Guns N' Roses that no one actually uses Google Shopping.

gfodor 9y ago

This "if (q.contains('gun')) return null;" approach is such a ham-fisted hack that causes such collateral damage that anyone who thought Google can be trusted anymore to responsibly wield their power over human commerce and thought and not act impulsively based on political whims should reconsider their position. Even if it is a mistake this kind of change should never be possible to ship. And if it's not a mistake, then I don't know what to say.

PhearTheCeal 9y ago
They did a similar thing with "confederate flag" not that long ago. I'm convinced Google Shopping is more for political PR than an actual place where anyone shops (Google probably knows this so doesn't care if they break their service to virtue signal)
- gfodor 9y ago
  Google is supposed to be the data driven organization that changes things in a way that will minimize collateral damage. Even if Google Shopping doesn't draw much traffic in relative terms, at Google scale I'm sure it provides meaningful revenue to all sorts of companies that have products that include the term "gun" that do not include weapons. To make such a change and not methodically try to reduce the blast radius for these people effectively proves that whoever is in charge over there is not rolling out changes to search algorithms in the way Google is supposed to be famous for. I worked on search algorithms for an ecommerce site that would kill for the kinds of traffic Google Shopping probably gets, and the idea that this would ever pass code review is laughable because of all of the blatantly obvious negative effects it would have on recall. At the very least, you would whitelist bigrams in query logs that go along with "gun" that do not include weapons. This is a truly amateur move, several steps away from what I would consider acceptable from the worlds premier search organization. I would fail a student taking an information retrieval course on a question if they provided this as a solution to removing a category of products from a search engine.
FLUX-YOU 9y ago
Google: "Okay, here's a bunch of technical interview hoops you have to jump through." Candidate: "Hey remember when you returned zero results for any query containing gun?"

_ph_ 9y ago

I am horrified. Whatever ones oppinion about gun control might be, and whether it is ok to remove actual guns from search results, it is absolutely horrible that a company like Google would consider it reasonable to build a filter just around the three letters "gun" in the search text.

sgurajada 9y ago

no results for `toy guns` too

deleted 9y ago

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DocTomoe 9y ago

This just smells of a Scunthorpe problem. What about a nice DVD of Gunsmith Cats, or a watch with gunmetal finish, or maybe a burgundy sweater?

sfcoder25 9y ago

Velvet Revolver too. All that money into DeepMind and this is the best they can do?

me551ah 9y ago

Does anyone actually use Google Shopping? I personally don't know anyone who does.

stronglikedan 9y ago
I do every time I shop. It's (was) the easiest price comparison for general products (that I know of). This is certainly a huge disappointment. I don't think I would have searched out an alternative anytime soon had this not happened.

DanAndersen 9y ago

I'm trying to figure out Google's angle here. Is this just a dumb legal-initiated move to shelter Google from culpability for any future gun crimes committed with guns purchased after looking at Google Shopping? Is this an attempt to shield against bad PR on social media from "supporting those evil gun sellers"? Or is this an attempt by Google to throw their weight around for ideological reasons, to try to make gun purchasing as much as a pariah as the Confederate flag became after Dylan Roof (when major online retailers did the same censoring)? Whatever the case, it's definitely making breaking up Google look a lot more appealing. Encourage your friends and family to get off of Google and use something like DuckDuckGo instead. For too many people, "Google = Internet", and it's becoming increasingly clear that that mindset will leave people vulnerable to inhabiting only a small curated collection of approved mindsets.

cft 9y ago
Virtue signaling at the highest corporate levels. Must have been approved by Pichai himself. He probably felt insufficient backing to say no (which would have been in the interest of the company) to the aspiring apparatchik that executed this as her career move.

gort 9y ago

I notice this has been pushed down the rankings on the frontpage (it was near the top a few minutes ago). Surely this sort of incompetent implementation of a politically-motivated decision by a major tech company is worthy of our attention? (Exactly how submissions end up at a position other than their natural ranking has always been a bit mysterious to me - should I blame some algorithm thing or malicious actors?)

Slansitartop 9y ago
It probably tripped the flamewar detector and/or was flagged (but not to the point of getting killed).

GiorgioG 9y ago

Bravo Google! You've managed to make zero positive impact on your implied corporate stance on "gun control" in the US. Worse, you've managed to degrade non-firearms related queries that contain 'gun.'

nemoniac 9y ago

It does return results containing "guns". If you search for "germs" and "steel", it returns the book "Guns, Germs and Steel". However it does not appear to return results if you search for "guns".

nemoniac 9y ago

Brilliant! A search for "gu n" yields "Did you mean gun" and offers gun related products.

mancerayder 9y ago

"Do no evil" as a marketing ploy, even if they dropped that officially. One person's evil is another person's free speech rights, or ambiguity (forget the 2nd Amendment for a moment). It reminds me a bit of a commercial I saw: in slow motion, people of different races were smiling and holding hands (nevermind that they looked like models, all of them), with some motto about diversity. I think the sun was rising, or setting. A few seconds later: a Nike logo at the bottom. There you have it, folks, that's what happens when politicial discourse is about symbols and words (ideas) and most importantly feelings instead of laws and economic policy.

zestyping 9y ago

Not just for searches containing the word "gun", but even words that contain "gun" as a substring! This returns no results: https://www.google.com/search?q=shogun&tbm=shop https://www.google.com/search?q=shogun&tbm=shop But this misspelled query shows that results for "Shogun" exist: https://www.google.com/search?q=shogon&tbm=shop https://www.google.com/search?q=shogon&tbm=shop Did anybody review or write tests for this changelist?

dhardy 9y ago

It gives results if you do it with spaces... so g u n works... *edit for clarity

kretash 9y ago

I don't understand how such a hacky piece of code made it to production. While water gun returns no results... water gu https://i.imgur.com/3pV73rs.png https://i.imgur.com/3pV73rs.png

gort 9y ago

Actually - do we know if this is new? I found this from 2012, for example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2012/07/05/google-sadly-joins-the-anti-gun-brigade/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2012/07/05/google-... Edit: The Telegraph picked this up just now, saying Google are "looking into" it... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/27/wine-lovers-cannot-buy-burgundy-tipple-google-internet-giant/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/27/wine-lovers-cann...

TYPE_FASTER 9y ago

Wow, this was implemented poorly. Even just adding "gun" to the list of stop words I assume they have would have allowed "burgundy" to keep returning results. String contains boolean condition? Bing Shopping also returns zero results for the search term "gun," but does return results for "gun safe," "burgundy," etc. Yahoo! Shopping seems to have the best compromise, returning relevant results for the search term "gun," like water guns and such, but filtering out "real" guns. The beautiful thing about the internet is we can go to another search engine, like DuckDuckGo. I would rather have Google mess this up and have to go to another site than the federal government attempt to increase regulatory control of internet traffic.

cgb223 9y ago

If only there was some kind of giant innovative cooperation that attracts only the best and brightest talent that could solve this nuanced problem...

dragonwriter 9y ago

Not just “gun”; “pistol” also works. Funny interaction with their matching / DWIM logic is that a query for “water pistol” returns no results, but “water pistil” returns lots of water pistols.

fiveFeet 9y ago

I love it. Thank you, Google! A lot of other tech companies - Paypal, Square, Stripe and Apple pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms. I hope other companies like Amazon, visa, master card will follow your footsteps.

dragonwriter 9y ago
Google Shopping still shows firearms, it just shows no results for correctly-spelled searches including “gun”, “pistol”, “rifle”. Search for either specific models, or misspellings for “rifel" or “pistil” or “revoler”.
- fiveFeet 9y ago
  Hopefully they will take care of this loophole as they improve the algorithm.

deleted 9y ago

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