Google Auto-Link

at around evening time on Sunday, the 27th of February 2005 by Chad

Google AutoLink technology is essentially the same thing used by Microsoft SmartTags. In fact, the same guy developed both of them.
At least MS was nice enough to enable a metatag to disable the SmartTags, however Google is basically telling the content providers (that is you and me boys and girls) to shove it.
If you need more information on this issue, take a look here.

Dan Gillmor has this to say:

Like several other people, I have raised serious questions about this product’s new “AutoLink” tool. It strikes me as an intrusion into people’s browsers by a company that commands great market share.

She listened to my concerns. And she explained Google’s stance — nothing new there, and it amounts to “this is all for the users’ benefit” defense. I am not convinced, however, that Google will end up doing the right thing in the end.

An excellent description and more information about the technology and the contraversy can be found here.

What I have done is taken the code provided at this site and constructed a plug-in wrapper for WordPress 1.5 blogsites.
Simply place both de-google.php and de-google.inc files from the zip file into your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it on the plugins page. This will add a section of javascript to each of your pages that will search for any Google autolinks and remove them.

You can download the plugin here.