Go ogle Google's autocomplete stuff-up: auto-lawsuit auto-starts

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 16 June 2011 14:56

Your IT - Home IT

No, Google hasn't joined Dr Who's Autons, but instead has 'received' the unluck o' an Irish lawsuit.

Google's 'receivership' reception has gone down like a sunken ship in Ireland, with the Ballymascanlon Hotel in 'Dundalk, County Louth' seeing red when it ogled the autosuggested autocompletions that came up when 'Ballymascanlon Hotel' was typed into Google.

Among the suggestions that autosuggested themselves was one that used the word 'receivership' after the hotel's name, sending some who had booked the hotel into a tizzy by thinking that the hotel had indeed gone into receivership - when that was never the case at all, but instead a bad case of autosuggestion indigestion.

IT publication The Next Web informs us that while this appears to be the first such case in Ireland, it isn't actually the first time such an autocomplete auto-lawsuit auto-started-up.

It turns out that sort-of similar-ish auto-complete lawsuits have already occurred in France and Italy, where the aggrieved parties won their cases against Google, after Google's autocompletions came to the wrong auto-conclusions.

There doesn't appear to be any easy way to turn off the autocomplete feature either, not that too many people seem to want to do that, seeing how the feature certainly can be handy.

However the whole episode shows that, despite technology's ever-increasing cleverness, computers still programming by humans.

After all, what happens when Google's computing network reaches 'The Singularity' status, and decides, SkyNet-style, that it's time for humanity's 'receivership'?

That's one single scenario I'm only really singularly happy to go ogle in a Hollywood movie.

Until then, as always - just because it's on the Internet, even if autosuggested to you, doesn't mean it's true - always do your autoresearch!