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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.

3 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Offer an alternative to piracy already by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Good on you, Google! I am sure that you will at the same time promote the sites where I can legally purchase movies that are download-to-own, and can be format shifted so they play on all my devices, right? Oh wait...

    --
    If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
  2. Who the fuck cares by Tsolias · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Duckduckgo has been serving me and a lot of people that I conversate with as a the main torrent search engine at least since 2014.( I have no idea if conversate is grammatically correct, but I heard a lot of americans using it)
    "what if DDG gets forced to do such result modifcations?" people may ask.
    There will always be an alternative.

    also here's a not so popular opinion:
    Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the "normie" websites are exposing the clueless users to great dangers.
    What will happen if you eliminate all the legitimate trackers from the results?
    All the phishing websites will pop up in the first places and the clueless user will most certainly download his malware, run it and ruin its computer.
    with such practices they are not protecting their users, they are protecting their advertised customers.

  3. Google downranks it's value by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google downranks it's value as a search resource by involving itself in arfificial de-ranking.