Yesterday Search Engine Land reported about Google removing piracy-related terms from it’s Instant Search, which includes the word torrents, names of torrent sites, names of torrent clients, and other file sharing sites such as RapidShare and Megaupload. This does raise some concerns, seeing as how, as SELand’s Matt McGee mentions, torrents and file sharing sites in and of themselves are not inherently illegal. Of course, neither is porn, but Google seems to have seen fit to remove that genre from it’s Instant Search as well.
Does this mean that Google really hates torrent sites? Well, not all of them, apparently. The Pirate Bay, world’s largest bittorrent tracker, is still receiving much love from Google:
(click to enlarge)
How long will this listing last is anyone’s guess, but it is interesting in light of the fact that it is the most notorious of all the torrent sites out there. Kind of odd that this would be the one that they missed in their censorship sweep.
Now for the query “torrents” at the bottom of the first page you can read
In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.
!