Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites In Search Results (torrentfreak.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Torrent Freak: In a comment to Australian media, Google states that it has demoted 65,000 [pirate] sites in search results, a list that's still growing every week. In total, the company received DMCA takedown requests for over 1.8 million domain names, so a little under 4% of these are downranked. The result of the measures is that people are less likely to see a pirate site when they type "watch movie X" or "download song Y." This means that these sites see a drop in visitors from Google and a quite significant one too. "Demotion results in sites losing around 90 percent of their visitors from Google Search," a Google spokesperson told The Age.

Comments

Re:Offer an alternative to piracy already

[Calydor]

Courtesy of The Oatmeal, a good list of what to do for legal TV shows:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/g...

Some alternatives

[Maelwryth]

Duck Duck Go and its lite version.
Findx.
Quant
I would include Startpage but they get results off Google. Qwant and DDG get results off Bing so they should probably be placed in the same boat. Findx actually has its own crawlers I think but their results are still iffy. However you can help them by adding your ranking to the results.