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

Offer an alternative to piracy already

[JaredOfEuropa]

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...

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...

Re: Offer an alternative to piracy already

[JaredOfEuropa]

Actually, for most of our history, such content actually was everyone's for the taking. Copyright was invented not for the benefit of creators but for the benefit of the public. Creators are granted a temporary monopoly on their work so they can sell it and derive an income from it, but that is the means rather than the goal. The goal was to encourage creators to create and publish so we can all enjoy their stuff. The goal was abundance, not artificial scarcity.

If creators or rights holders choose to not publish their works under "reasonable" terms, they violate their end of the deal. Funny you should mention New Zealand, there's a country used to afraid to be stuck in the arse end of DVD region coding where lots of stuff would never be published, and that fear was not unfounded. Here in the Netherlands, the government's position - before they caved in to publishers' lobbyists - was that if content wasn't available legally under "reasonable" terms, they wouldn't prosecute someone who availed himself of the material illegally. In other words, they sent a message to the rights holders: "Sort out your damn licenses and sales channels, or be content with your stuff being pirated". And that was a good law; it is high time the public claws back some of the rights we have lost over the years.

Sure, you can argue about what those "reasonable terms" should be, and over here that meaning changed over time. You can't expect to get a movie on Netflix 1 week after it hits the cinemas. But where before it took DVDs 6 months to a year to hit the shelves, nowadays we expect that to be sooner. In the old days bundling songs on an album was the norm, nowadays people expect to be able to buy individual songs. And at last the EU is gearing up to enforce licenses for all of the region, so no more content that is available in one country but not the other. Buying DVDs used to be the norm, nowadays people expect downloads or streaming options. And at least the music industry has followed up on this: there are tons of legal ways to get music, and there's no reason to pirate it at all. But if you won't sell me that e-book even though you're happy to send me a hardcopy, just because of the country I am in and whatever screwed up licensing deal you made, then screw you; the Pirate Bay has what I need. I am more than happy to pay you for your work, but if you won't sell it to me, then I have zero moral remorse over getting it by other means.

Who the fuck cares

[Tsolias]

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.

Re:Who the fuck cares

[psnyder]

Sometimes conversating gets more complexicated irregardless of localation.

Google downranks it's value

[Bing Tsher E]

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

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.

Time for a new search engine

[AHuxley]

Not an ad company that hides results.

Re:Here maps

[CaptainDork]

The Americanizationism of the indigeneousley concatenated form of the corrupted "F**'em is (localizationizing a locality-based colloquallismatctation) is "Fuck 'em."

Nice site you have there

[Epsillon]

This sounds, to me, like a protection racket in the making. "Give us money and show our ads or we'll mark you down as a pirate."

As much as censorship is distasteful, this is infinitely worse. The power it gives Google boggles the mind.