Google rolls out censorship!

[tangent4ronpaul]

One week later, Google algorithm change hits streaming, torrent sites hard
After early efforts in 2012, it appears Google's gotten the results it wanted.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...new-algorithm/

Video streaming and torrent sites have dropped precipitously in Google rankings after the company altered its algorithm last Monday, according to reports from Searchmetrics. One of Project Free TV's main operating domains, free-tv-video-online.me, fell 96 percent in Searchmetric's rankings, one of the biggest drops alongside torrentz.eu and thepiratebay.se.

Google committed to fighting piracy by decrementing search results that allow users to access illegal streams or torrents back in 2012. The first round of changes didn't help much, according to interested parties like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Google complies with takedown requests, of which it received 224 million in the last year, according to its own report. The company responded to these within six hours on average, but industry parties pushed for Google to make content sites less visible overall. Even with its new solution, Google notes that this won't be the same as removing domains from search entirely: "the number of noticed pages is typically only a tiny fraction of the total number of pages on the site," the company said.

But in a week, the algorithm changes have already made a difference. In addition to the sites listed above, kickass.to's Searchmetrics visibility dropped 66 percent, zippyshare.com dropped 86 percent, and extratorrent.cc dropped just over 80 percent. Should an Internet user go looking for certain material via search, they will be less likely to see these sites among the results.

-t

who will they blacklist next?

[dannno]

Hmm ya people will still find what they are looking for and augment their searches to do so.

[presence]

lol

torrentz.eu is still the first result returned for seach keyword: "torrentz"

[FindLiberty]

The king of search engines is now* dead to me, long live AltaVista!

*(LOL, maybe not now almost dead yet, but fewer unicorn and rainbows IMO)

[jmdrake]

Okay. Maybe it's just me. But I don't see this as censorship and, in this case, actually applaud Google. Why should it be the case that if I'm doing a search for a movie the first results should be where I can download it illegally? As someone pointed out, you can still find the "torrent" if you put "torrent" in the search term. I remember early in the days of the internet, parents and teachers were shocked to find out that when children innocently typed "toys" into a search engine, sex toys came up on the front page. If you typed in Disney, Disney porn came up on the first page. I think it was crap like that which spurred calls for real censorship on the internet and the rush to put filters on library and school internets (something I also agree with.) I think this is more of the same. People who are wanting to find the torrents can still find them. People who are just looking to see information about something that might be available as a torrent will find the legit sites first.