Google To Start Punishing Pirate Sites In Search Results

An anonymous reader sends word of a change Google will be making to its search algorithms. Beginning next week, the company will penalize the search rankings of websites who are the target of many copyright infringement notices from rightsholders. Quoting The Verge: "Google says the move is designed to 'help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily' — meaning that it's trying to direct people who search for movies, TV shows, and music to sites like Hulu and Spotify, not torrent sites or data lockers like the infamous MegaUpload. It's a clear concession to the movie and music industries, who have long complained that Google facilitates piracy — and Google needs to curry favor with media companies as it tries to build an ecosystem around Google Play. Google says it feels confident making the change because because its existing copyright infringement reporting system generates a massive amount of data about which sites are most frequently reported — the company received and processed over 4.3 million URL removal requests in the past 30 days alone, more than all of 2009 combined. Importantly, Google says the search tweaks will not remove sites from search results entirely, just rank them lower in listings."

Comments

Re:Wow. Really?

[Blue Stone]

Getting into the content business will be the death of Google as an honest broker of information.

Re:what about themselves?

[Serious Callers Only]

YouTube is full of pirated material nowadays, and it gets put back up as fast as it comes down, even with their automated systems. Here's a long list:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22full+movie%22

About 13,200,000 results, of which the vast majority are not there with copyright holder's permission. As to the adverts, those are making money for Google, not for the copyright holders, which is why they don't really care if the situation continues.

It's interesting to see just how sociopathic Google is becoming now that they are in a position of dominance, and have grown to be a large company. What's interesting about Google's position now is that because they dominate search, and yet make money from ads, the less effective the search is at finding things the better for them - it means they sell more ads to sites desperate to rank well again.

Re:iTunes is great

[darkpixel2k]

I've recently started using iTunes for music and movie rentals and it works flawlessly. So there's no justification of "no good legal alternatives" anymore, as both Spotify and iTunes are actually easier and nicer to use than pirate sites. The same goes for Steam.

Pop open your iTunes client and do a search for me....(because as far as I know iTunes doesn't run on Linux).

I want you to search for a song I recall from my childhood. My father used to play it on his record player while working in the garage. Being just a kid at the time, I'd sit nearby hammering nails into his workbench while he crafted bookshelves for people. The song is 'Escape'. If something does come up, I guarantee it's wrong. The song I'm looking for is by Michael Garrison from his album "In the Regions of Sunreturn". Nothing? Try Googling for it. You might find a youtube video with the song, or maybe a sample on some music geek's website, but good luck getting a legitimate copy.

Michael Garrison is long dead, and a few years before my father unexpectedly passed away I noticed a copy of the record floating around ThePirateBay. I grabbed it, burned it to a CD and gave it to him on his birthday. He hadn't heard the song since his record collection was destroyed back in the 80s. I never saw him so happy to be listening to a CD. Thank God we have the RIAA to try and stop moments like those.

In the last 10 years I have run into that record twice in all my eBay, CraigsList, and Amazon searching.

So good luck. Once someone creates a fairly complete library of music, along with an easy way to BUY songs (not rent or borrow), and the prices are reasonable--I'll start using it. I'd hate for my kids to grow up and remember a song their dad played in their youth, only to find "Barbie Girl" unavailable and unplayable because it's DRM'd and backed by a bunch of sue-happy lawyers.

Oh--and I'm joking. I hate "Barbie Girl". ;)