With the aim to protect the interests of copyright holders, Google is making ‘pirate’ sites more difficult for its users to find. This week the search engine revealed more information about the scope of this effort. Thus far, Google has downranked 65,000 sites, a measure that led to a 90% reduction in referrals from search results.
Good move. Also, we need to move to I2P.
https://geti2p.net/en/about/intro
65,000 pirate sites… are there really that many? Or is it more like 64,500 just serve ads and malware?
Maybe the ads and malware are pirated?
Hi,
It was one pirate web site; but then 64999 people copied it without the owner’s permission. 😉
– Brendan
Or all those sites that have a “robots.txt” that blocks their search bots…
Does this include emulator sites ? 🙁
Any website our Overlord does not approve of. Now behave or else…
Seems like we need our webrings back…
An index should show what’s been indexed. Google’s results for searches I do for older web pages often only shows results that I didn’t ask for. I prefer that they show only results relevant to what is being searched for. I don’t really care about pirate sites. But, they keep changing things to suit whatever preferences they decide that you will get, not what you want.
DuckDuckGo FTW. Actually I have no idea if they’re good for looking up pirated stuff, but you know, the whole tracking thing…
YouTube is certainly, by far, the largest trove of pirated content.
Is Google downranking Youtube, or only the competing pirate sites?
Obviously, Google prefers when people watch pirated content on YouTube, as it is a source of ad revenue.
Though Youtube is by now sort of sanctioned by copyright holders; even Last.fm links to yt vids of tracks…
I haven’t used Google for search for about 7 years now. Duck Duck Go FTW
At this point, Google has become useless for almost anything beside language usage and such like queries. Just recently I googled for a medical issue trying to imitate my elderly parents. Most of the first 50 results were various snake oil peddlers (including urine therapy!) with a sprinkling of “public service” sites like WebMD and Mayo Clinic that presented information on a level of a 10 year old. It’s not only English, results in Russian and French are almost as bad, except for their “public service” analogs present the information in a somewhat more adult manner.
And don’t even try to search for opinions that are not universally recognized by establishment as gratifyingly politically correct.