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Google Wipes 786 Pirate Sites From Search Results (torrentfreak.com)
Google and several leading Russian search engines have completely wiped 786 "pirate" sites from their search results. That's according to telecoms watch Rozcomnadzor, which reports that the search providers delisted the sites after ISPs were ordered by a Moscow court to permanently block them. TorrentFreak reports: Late July, President Vladimir Putin signed a new law which requires local telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor to maintain a list of banned domains while identifying sites, services, and software that provide access to them. [...] Nevertheless, on October 1 the new law ("On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection") came into effect and it appears that Russia's major search engines have been very busy in its wake. According to a report from Rozcomnadzor, search providers Google, Yandex, Mail.ru, Rambler, and Sputnik have stopped presenting information in results for sites that have been permanently blocked by ISPs following a decision by the Moscow City Court. "To date, search engines have stopped access to 786 pirate sites listed in the register of Internet resources which contain content distributed in violation of intellectual property rights," the watchdog reports. The domains aren't being named by Rozcomnadzor or the search engines but are almost definitely those sites that have had complaints filed against them at the City Court on multiple occasions but have failed to take remedial action. Also included will be mirror and proxy sites which either replicate or facilitate access to these blocked and apparently defiant domains.
I should remove these from my index too. I need a list of the sites I have to remove.
I was amused to learn a while back that some people simply are incapable of typing a domain name into a browser's URL field. They only know how to search for everything via Google.
I was at a friend's house one day talking about going to a baseball game. I told him to go to nationals.com to see where good seats remained. He dutifully opened up google.com and typed "nationals.com" into the search bar. No, I am not kidding.
So this kind of restriction actually has much greater impact than it first might seem.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
Google's only removing this for results served up via Google.ru, right?
Anyway, the better way to do this (for the evil government) would not be to depend on the foreign search engine, but to mandate ISPs have transparent proxies that will filter pages on the fly. And also (not coincidentally) MitM your SSL for the police and intelligence agencies to be able to access all your traffic.
Remove the links not just from Google, but from anything served up to a Russian-connected computer from any source.
Nuff said.
Google removing domains from search results can and will be a tool of other kinds of legal censorship, including political censorship. "Pirate sites" is not necessarily a well defined term. Is some of the material on those sites content that engages in satire, or other forms of fair use? Or has there been a rubber stamp of "piracy" for hosting content that is, even on casual review legal? Will a government or private "anti-piracy" agency review sites, hunt for a captured or quoted article, and get it pulled from Google search results under the guise of "anti-piracy"
Such censorship has certainly occurred on Youtube, which Google owns, and for Google mentioned search results. I'm concerned that Google is losing, if it ever had, the ability to refuse censorship requests.
There isn't much information, but it seems quite clear that all this is only applicable to Russia. I am currently testing yandex.com to see what it can do and, although the results are a bit different and kind of Russian-sites prone, it should be quite independent from yandex.ru (a quite random guess anyway, as far as I don't speak Russian and cannot really test it). In any case, these news shouldn't affect yandex.com or other international versions of Russian sites.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
It tries to guess what you want instead of searching for what you want. I try and exclude pinterest from image search results and I get nothing but pinterest links. Instead of one or two sponsored links per page I get 5 or more (at LEAST they still identify them as sponsored links) beyond the obvious ones there are certainly companies that game the result system clogging up legit things I'm looking for with snake oil sales (for example "calm clinic" which is a book selling scheme that preys on people who have questions about anxiety symptoms)
If Google can't deliver good search results then I have no use for it, DuckDuckGo ain't perfect but its becoming more and more useful...
crazy dynamite monkey
That is why I have started to use duckduckgo a bit less advertising, a bit less filtering. The google search engine is only useful to me as long as it returns the sights I am after. If it does not I use another search engine.