Google to sink pirate websites in search rankings

The most searched stuff on the net has always been warez and porn, and Google always indexed both. So good luck with that.

I saw this quote after Demoind (spelling?) got taken down the other day... "I felt a great disturbance in the Force... as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."

How does a computer (a search engine) know what is illegal content? That takes human interaction. As long as there are html links to illegal content it will be spidered and indexed, and the more links to it from other sites the more relevant it will be as a search result.

"Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site," Google senior vice president of engineering Amit Singhal said in a blog post.

Sounds like YouTube will disappear from Google search results...

How does a computer (a search engine) know what is illegal content? That takes human interaction.

It does take human interaction.

As per the article:

"Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site," Google senior vice president of engineering Amit Singhal said in a blog post.

Since Google revamped its copyright removal process two years ago it has been able to gather much more data about pirated content popping up online, according to Singhal.

"Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results," Singhal said.

First Google will show your e-mail in the search engine, malwares and spammers thank Google for that. Now they're going to censor sites? Step by step Google is getting closer to the abyss. I just wished BING was a decent search engine. Time to other companies enter this field.

Good thing RIAA doesn't infringe on any copyrights... Best thing to do is to simply launch valid takedown notices to every media company in the country (through google). They steal plenty of photos from people after all.

Now they're going to censor sites?

Not really censoring, per se. They're not changing the content nor excluding them - this isn't the iTunes marketplace. But they are putting them down the list.

a neat commercially oriented solution to a legal problem!

If they are counting the number of copyright removal notices, Google's Youtube should sink down the ratings.