[RickS]

That's an uncharitably reductionist take. Please refer to the original comment that started this thread.

> Certain words & phrases I know would produce legitimate useful search results in 2008 will now just pull pages of unrelated ads.

A person asked for examples. I delivered examples. I'm not contesting that the search is illegal in some jurisdictions. Merely pointing out that there are searches for which google used to return results with utility, and now intentionally do not return such results, and fall back to irrelevant suggestions.

Although the comment I made said more than what you implied it to, I will explicitly make the complaint you're mocking: Yes, I am unhappy that such results are censored. But it's not merely "I want free albums". I want to be able to search the internet. Not someone else's ideas of what the internet ought to be. It's a legally and ethically difficult problem, to be sure, but I think mocking the idea of supporting searches that the government dislikes is a step too far.

The Chinese and US governments' censorship regimes are not equivalent in magnitude, so it's not fair to compare them simply, but just as we can entertain the idea that the chinese are unfree in their searches for information, and as a result the breadth of what they can think about and experience, let's recognize that so too are we in the western world.