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Popular Torrent Site Disappears From Google After Penalty
An anonymous reader writes: Following what appears to be a severe penalty, the popular torrent site KickassTorrents has become pretty much unfindable in Google. Meanwhile, the top search result in many locations points to a scam site that's serving malware to its visitors. For now, only DuckDuckGo presents the real site as a main result. With millions of visitors per day, KickassTorrents is arguably the most visited torrent site on the Internet, and has gained new users during the moments when the notorious Pirate Bay has been offline.
Hideki!
Did they try just kickass? First result is kat.cr - it even comes up in the url/search bar while I am typing.
sad but true. Im finding myself using bing more and more because google is not giving me what i am searching for
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Seems that google has some kind of (memory) corruption otherwise they (don't) censor things.
1.) So basically you can find the url via wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
2.) Kickasstorrents have a (?censor resistant?) twitteraccount:
https://twitter.com/kickasstor...
3.) you can reach KAT:
kickass.to
kat.cr
https://kat.cr/ That is their new location
Even their damn name is synonymous with the word search.
Doesn't change the fact that their search sucks. There's just no clear competitor yet who obviously sucks less.
Just look at something as simple as trying to find a review of a graphics card, as I did a few days ago. Hundreds of retail sites which list the card, just because the page mentions 'review', before I get to an actual honest-to-god review.
The real winners are the malware creators that get their sites listed at the top now.
In order to take down the torrent trackers providing grey warez the real black ware market feeding the true criminals and terrorists are getting free space to install adware and whatnot instead.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Personalized search results might be scary, but are extremely useful.
Google won't think for you.
Unfortunately, Google tries to think for you all the time, and usually make a bad job of it. You can't possibly be searching for [thing you typed], you must mean [thing with a similar name that's much more popular on social media this week]. You don't want established information about [thing you typed], you want 3 search pages of the same [parroted news story vaguely related to thing from this morning]. You don't want [famous torrent site], you want [misleadingly named malware domain because we've nuked the actual site for some mysterious reason of our own]. Once upon a time, Google was used by people who were happy to think for themselves. Now it targets the mass market, and has algorithms designed to second guess poorly constructed searches at the expense of dumbing down the experience for the minority of users who can put together a precise set of search terms. It feels like a blunt instrument now - finding anything obscure always seems to need multiple quoted strings (like AltaVista back in the day) and Verbatim mode.