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Piracy Communications Google Network The Internet

Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites In Search Results (torrentfreak.com) 80

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.
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Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites In Search Results

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  • by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @08:03AM (#56870444) Journal
    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...
    • by Calydor ( 739835 )

      They already do that. They go at the very top of the list, and are then followed by sites that let you pay through the nose to watch the movie once.

      • 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...

        They already do that. They go at the very top of the list, and are then followed by sites that let you pay through the nose to watch the movie once.

        No, no they do not. In the USA, none of the download-to-own movies can be legally format shifted so they play on all devices, because they all include some kind of copyright protection and bypassing that is a violation of the DMCA. The last video format we are allowed to format shift is VHS, because of a ruling against Macrovision. (In the same vein, the last audio format we are allowed to format shift is CDDA, because they only have a copy protection bit and it is standard practice to ignore it.)

        • by Calydor ( 739835 )

          WHOOSH.

          The joke was that the top of the list had zero entries, and then came the rest.

        • In the USA, none of the download-to-own movies can be legally format shifted so they play on all devices

          What devices don't support the formats widely used on pay sites? I've not had to format shift anything for quite some time.

        • You're an idiot.

          In the US, consumers who buy something can format-shift it however they like.

          Presumably you were credulous of warnings and statements otherwise made by the company that produced the content. But did you know that even the "FBI Warning" at the start of movies isn't from the FBI? It is just a thing from the movie company, telling you the name of the national law enforcement agency in the United States.

          The Macrovision ruling was about what companies can sell, not about what consumers can do. Al

    • So if the reason they are downranked is because they belong to some class, can I improve my search for these sites by putting the name of that class in the key word search.

      If so then downranking should also result in concentration making an appropriately worded search actually produce better results.

      Perhaps they could even make it an exclusive category

      Pirate: Game of Thrones

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        The reason Google is waffling shite about the down ranking is they are the quislings of the corrupt. See, they are proudly proclaiming, we are attacking the choices of the people and fully 100% behind the corrupt establishment. This is actually a good thing, a solid indication that sites like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck... [duckduckgo.com] are really starting to hurt. Hence the desire to appeal to the corrupt, to attack those that threaten Google's dominance. See google is the good little corrupt authoritarian tool, who

    • 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...

      Yep, all of those options already come up at the very top of the search results. The fact you don't see them just means...

    • 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...

      Yes they do. Google Play Store, Itunes, Amazon Video and many other places allow you to legally purchase and download to own in formats that'll play on anything, many titles being released the same day they are in the cinemas so stop trying to use that well out of date bullshit excuse as a reason for your thievery.

  • Who the fuck cares (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tsolias ( 2813011 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @08:19AM (#56870480)

    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.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Now if only they downranked all the scam sites, include youtube links, that only pretend to point to pirated content but actually either link to malware, ad link chains, or pushes to sign up for paid stuff. Then it'd be legit sites, news/journalism sites, pirate sites, and then scam sites instead of scam sites, legit sites, pirate sites, news/journalism sites.

  • by Bing Tsher E ( 943915 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @08:46AM (#56870552) Journal

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

    • This.

      Google, Google, Google, why is it always Google? Momma always did like Google best.

      Sure, the people who live in urban areas have choices like Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, dogpike and stuff, but those who live in rural areas only have access to Google.

    • Their search accuracy is getting worse every day. They regularly ignore keywords in my searches so I then have to put quotes around them and even then a lot of times they still get ignored. For example last night I'm looking over beers at the store and decide to see what the IBU rating was for one brand. I type in the name of the beer followed by IBU. Google totally ignores IBU and strikes it out every time for all 10 results. Put quotes around IBU and hey what do you know it takes me right to the brewery's

      • I've noticed this too. Google is not as good at searching the internet as it used to be. Instead of showing me what I searched for, it shows me what the "intelligent" algorithm thinks I ought to see.

        It's okay though - Big Brother Google knows best. Us po', ign'rant crackers should bow before the superior wisdom of the all-seeing GOOG.

  • Some alternatives (Score:5, Informative)

    by Maelwryth ( 982896 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @09:25AM (#56870642) Homepage Journal
    Duck Duck Go [duckduckgo.com] and its lite version [duckduckgo.com].
    Findx [findx.com].
    Quant [qwant.com]
    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.
    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Thanks for Findx. Good to support brands that are searching the web.
    • by mohsel ( 2505642 )
      I was hoping someone would post some alternatives. thanks for doing so.
      I'll try using exclusively Findx for as long as i can, and i'd deactivate my ad blocker if their ads don't try to track me and are only selected according to my query.
  • by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @09:55AM (#56870714) Journal
    Not an ad company that hides results.
  • There is tons of pirated material on youtube. Then there are the google books.

    I guess wants to eliminate competition.

    • There's also adding good ole "intitle:index of" to your queries, to find unprotected website listings full of goodies to plunder.
  • No errors?
    All sites validated to be serving torrents of copyrighted material?
    Not one mistake?

    So we can conclude that everyone issuing DMCA is perfectly honest and no sites with critical viewpoints of countries, companies or people are on that list? Right?
  • by Epsillon ( 608775 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @10:51AM (#56870904) Journal
    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.
    • I'll bet most of the pirate sites would really love it if google would accept them to show their advertising, they'd make more money.

  • Learn a foreign language to the level required to say "watch $EnglishMovieTitle online".

    Example, in Romanian: "vezi $EnglishMovieTitle online". Sometimes you could get better results by adding the word "gratis" to your query.

    The websites you find might be unintelligible, but the thing you're looking for might be intuitive enough for you to use even though you don't speak Klingon. Yeah, send a DMCA notice to Google Translate, because soon enough people will be searching for "online schauen", "Ver en linea",

    • by iTrawl ( 4142459 )

      Hmm... you also need to find an English-friendly country which uses subtitles rather than dubbing, so that petty much leaves you with Romanian. I've tried Spanish and Russian and they're dubbing their copies. Had zero luck with Hungarian (come on guys, contribute to Google Translate).

      Guess you're stuck with Romanian sites then :)

  • 65,000,000 pirates downrank Google in search preference.

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