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Piracy Google

Popular Torrent Site Disappears From Google After Penalty 165

Posted by Soulskill from the you-can't-get-there-from-here dept.
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.
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Popular Torrent Site Disappears From Google After Penalty More

Popular Torrent Site Disappears From Google After Penalty

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  • Points at DuckDuckGo (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18, 2015 @07:18PM (#50137487)

    Hideki!

    • Not sure what your post has to do with the topic, but for those who are curious you are drawing from the anime, Chobits.

  • Google is becoming irrelevant (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Just like their search results. Kind of ironic that they have become a laggard in an industry they used to excel at.

    • Re:Google is becoming irrelevant (Score:5, Funny)

      by ganjadude ( 952775 ) on Saturday July 18, 2015 @08:01PM (#50137639) Homepage
      sad but true. Im finding myself using bing more and more because google is not giving me what i am searching for

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by amiga3D ( 567632 )

        Wahahahahahaha....damn that shit is hilarious. Sadly I have no points but you sure as hell deserve +5 Funny!

        Bing was set up on our computers as the default search engine but it only took about a week and now there's not a computer at work that still defaults to bing.

        • i joke but seriously, its getting harder and harder to find results that are not ads, or political spin anymore on the first page for the majority of my searches (cue the jokes about my name)

          • Same thing that killed Altavista. A search site is only as useful as long as it can resist this.

          • You're not using personalized search results then.

        • In my tests, DDG returned the best results, then Bing, then Google. Which, honestly makes sense. Bing's results are better for the same reason Mac's are/were so much safer. Being #2, you get to avoid most of the effort because it goes into fucking up #1.

      • I find Google blocking things to be highly annoying. Try the search of Google shopping for a confederate flag or battle flag of Virginia as an example.

        I go to Bing, and the first results are relevant. It makes me wonder how many other things are being Google-Washed away. IMHO Google has hit the tipping point where it will start to drive users away to other search engines because of their corporate behavior.

    • Google is as good as a centralized search engine is likely to get. But any centralized entity has an inherent evolutionary disadvantage in the Age of Information: it can be censored.

  • There are plenty of references and it is easy to find.

    So not "unfindable".

  • Google showing malware results? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    And who's surprised by that?

  • Umm (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jwymanm ( 627857 ) on Saturday July 18, 2015 @07:33PM (#50137539) Homepage
    Did they try just kickass? First result is kat.cr - it even comes up in the url/search bar while I am typing.
    • I get kickass.proxyindex.net/ as first result. Typing in the url bar obviously will show sites that are in my history, so it's not the same.
    • And from germany the first web site which comes up is NOT kat.cr, but some sort of weird proxyfinder site. The other one might be old site.

      Kickass Torrents: KAT kickass.proxyindex.net/ Search and discuss new and favorite TV shows & TV series, movies, music and games. The Walking Dead. - Kickass Torrents

      kickass.to/usearch/The%20Walking%20Dead/ A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt â" learn more. KAT - Kickass Torrents kickass-torrent.ytsre.eu/

    • I got kickass.to/usearch/Man%20Of%20Steel/ as my first result. The second result was the fake site, but the first result didn't land at the KaT homepage.

    • Are you using personalized search results and have visited it before?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by jwymanm ( 627857 )
        No, I actually have not been to kat.cr before. I tested it with incognito and it comes up also. It's only when I add torrents that it seems to get overloaded with fakes.

  • Filthy pirates! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    For each copy of Windows you guys steal, Bill and Steve make less money. Which means another black baby in Africa gets malaria and one less Clipper gets a line of blow to do with his hooker tonight.

    Hope you're proud of yourselves, heartless pricks!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by amiga3D ( 567632 )

      Damn! I'm so sorry. I never thought of it like that.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      For each copy of Windows you "steal", you became a windows user regardless, and when you get hired by a big company, they have to actually buy windows (or get sued to give microsoft some cool millions) to you be able to work on it.

  • Google needs our help (kickass.to kat.cr) (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18, 2015 @08:05PM (#50137657)

    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/... [wikipedia.org]

    2.) Kickasstorrents have a (?censor resistant?) twitteraccount:
    https://twitter.com/kickasstor... [twitter.com]

    3.) you can reach KAT:
    kickass.to
    kat.cr

  • It moved to new domain (Score:5, Informative)

    by giveen1 ( 2727899 ) on Saturday July 18, 2015 @08:37PM (#50137735)
    https://kat.cr/ [kat.cr] That is their new location

  • No link to the real site? I'm not sure which is the original and which ones are just mirrors and malware.

    http://kat.cr/ [kat.cr]
    http://kickasstorrents.video/ [kickasstorrents.video]

  • My first page results for kickass torrents on google are:

    Kickass Torrents: KAT
    kickass.proxyindex.net/

    KickassTorrents Homepage – latest updates and reviews
    kickasstorrents.eu/
    THIS IS THE MALWARE SITE

    KickassTorrents (@kickasstorrents) | Twitter
    https://twitter.com/kickasstor... [twitter.com]

    KickassTorrents - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    KickassTorrents
    kickass.to/usearch/The%20Walking%20Dead/

    KAT - Kickass Torrents
    kickass-torrent.ytsre.eu/

    KickassTorrents Disappears F

  • never mind search engine results (Score:3)

    by ihtoit ( 3393327 ) on Saturday July 18, 2015 @10:04PM (#50137957)

    Virgin Media have taken it upon themselves to reduce the Internet to "programmed" content by blocking certain sites pursuant to a court order which I have yet to see. They don't even offer a LINK. What I'm getting for my fifty quid a month is basically scheduled content just like the TV. It's a six hundred quid a year fucking television licence fee!

    Yet, they're advertising the internet. Selectively filtered content is NOT the internet.

    • It's a court order, they have little choice. But their blocking is also trivial to circumvent. Pirate bay is blocked, yes... but not if you go via https.

  • Quawk It with DuckDuckGo (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Just switch to DuckDuckGo, like post NSA people did. You can even add !kickasstorrents to only search kickass in DDG.

    The sooner we all switch away from Google, a search engine that logs everything, (and also has adverts on pretty much every site, and analytics on every site,) the better.

    You realize that Google has all your kickasstorrent searches don't you? And if you are a lawmaker, then your kids kickasstorrent searches are also in the NSA database ready to be leverage against you? Get them into the hab

    • It's getting better. Most of the time I don't need to Google, but if I'm having trouble, I add g! to the beginning of my search and Google adds a data point to my advertising profile, but I get a second opinion, usually not very helpful.

      DDG seems too good to be true really. I wonder if they're *really* not watching.

  • ... I just switched to DuckDuckGo.

  • kickass torrents [google.com.au]

    First three results

    • Kickass Torrents: KAT kickass.proxyindex.net/
      Search and discuss new and favorite TV shows & TV series, movies, music and games.
    • KickassTorrents
      kickass.to/usearch/The%20Walking%20Dead/ A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt â" learn more.
    • In the news
      Image for the news result
      KickassTorrents Disappears From Google After Penalty TorrentFreakâZ - 17 hours ago

    Story posted by Soulskill - probably the explanation

  • 1. You use search engine rather than typing in known URL of a site, to get to a site

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If you RTFA, the domain name keeps changing, so it's difficult to remember when that happens.

      • if you follow the tech news site articles, the domain name has been announced in those, including the most recent change of April 24th

        Started 2008
        changed to kat.ph in April 2011
        kickass.to in June 2013
        kickass.so in December 2014

        then on April 23 2015 for one day kickass.tm then then next day
        April 24 to kat.cr

  • tl;dr: their domain went down and it took a little while for the new ones to float to the top of google.

  • The real winners (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Sunday July 19, 2015 @01:11AM (#50138509) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • That is an interesting side effect. If Google is actually manually nuking the true site, you would think they'd take the extra five minutes to go a bit deeper, rather than serve up malware.

      In all honesty, I'd respect Google (and the folks who want Google to manage/censor results) if a search for that name came up with a box saying "Yeah, we know what you want, but we're not going to show it to you because [reasons]".

  • The thing I never understood about the Kickass torrents site is that to use it they want you to sign up for a "free account", but to get one you need to supply your credit card info. Yeah, I don't think so. I'll go elsewhere, thanks.

    • That's not likely to be the real site.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I have an account on Kickass and I was never asked for a credit card number, just a working email address. Anything asking for a card number as verification is almost certainly a scam.

    • That's a fake site, probably kat.to. It used to be correct but was hijacked about 6 or so months ago. kat.cr is the current one but it may not be for long; things change quickly in that world.

  • DMCA (Score:2)

    by Meneth ( 872868 )
    KAT isn't as good as it used to be. They started censoring torrents in response to DMCA requests a few months back.

  • I'm finding it increasingly hard to find decent releases on kickass and have started moving back to the pirate bay.

  • Let's hope that the agency responsible for this has thousands of users searching for TV-series on the office computers and get directed by Google to the Number 1 malware site where they download said malware on the office computers.

  • This is just as much a punishment to Google's own users, as it is to Kickass's. People who type in the search query are obviously looking to get to the site, not whatever malware-ridden crap Google is serving up now. Google is making their own service shittier, just to punish somebody else...way to cut your nose off to spite your face.

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