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.
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."
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.
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.
Well you know more about Google than I do. It just seems like a big change with a lot of very predictable/testable collateral damage as pointed out in the rest of this thread.
