Google To Start Punishing Pirate Sites In Search Results 294
An anonymous reader sends word of a change Google will be making to its search algorithms. Beginning next week, the company will penalize the search rankings of websites who are the target of many copyright infringement notices from rightsholders. Quoting The Verge:
"Google says the move is designed to 'help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily' — meaning that it's trying to direct people who search for movies, TV shows, and music to sites like Hulu and Spotify, not torrent sites or data lockers like the infamous MegaUpload. It's a clear concession to the movie and music industries, who have long complained that Google facilitates piracy — and Google needs to curry favor with media companies as it tries to build an ecosystem around Google Play. Google says it feels confident making the change because because its existing copyright infringement reporting system generates a massive amount of data about which sites are most frequently reported — the company received and processed over 4.3 million URL removal requests in the past 30 days alone, more than all of 2009 combined. Importantly, Google says the search tweaks will not remove sites from search results entirely, just rank them lower in listings."
what about themselves? (Score:5, Insightful)
So no more YouTube search results in Google, then?
Re:iTunes is great (Score:1, Insightful)
Right. Because all entertainment media is on iTunes and/or Spotify just like all games are on Steam.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
This has "BAD IDEA" written all over it. Google is going to tweak their ranking based on how many URL removal notices it has received? I smell both a new skill being marketed by SEOs, a new strategy employed by scummy companies to up their ranking, and just a total nightmare for anyone trying to compete with the big content boys. Start making real inroads in content delivery? Get hit by automated takedown notices brought by more-or-less acknowledged affiliates of big content, and watch your Google ranking drop. Maybe this will signal the recurrence of search engines like dogpile.
What is a search engine? (Score:5, Insightful)
If a search engine abandon neutrality this way. Then why not avoid violent sites? porn sites? sites with bad spelling? sites that are not political correct? where is the line here?. You must have a line, that you will never cross, because some people will push you more and more.
Re:iTunes is great (Score:5, Insightful)
So there's no justification of "no good legal alternatives" anymore
Yes there are:
* Territory restrictions
* DRM
* Format choices
* Encoding Quality
* Content availability
* Not enough choice of stores with a wide selection of content
But perhaps the biggest one:
* Indefensible copyright terms
Re:Great for rentals with caveats (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What is a search engine? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:iTunes is great (Score:3, Insightful)
Kill my competitors (Score:3, Insightful)
2) Have shell company send take down notices about my competitors website
3) Watch them vanish from the search results
4) Profit!
Re:. . . The end of Google . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
And the beginning of the next search giant.
Or is anybody here naive enough to believe that nobody will want to fill the incredibly lucrative market which Google appears ready to abandon?
You mean that of a "good search engine?"
Google used to be the good search engine. They've already abandoned it. Do a search for a monetize-able term like "insurance." You'll get 7 ads before you get a single search result. Google is an ad engine, not a search engine.
I switched my Chrome bar to duckduckgo a few months ago... I don't have anything against Google. They make a great browser, awesome web mail, and cars that drive themselves. But their search engine is no longer of quality... this isn't even a "final nail", just yet another symptom.
How about penalizing fake / useless sites? (Score:5, Insightful)
Take Hulu. They pollute global search rankings by pretending to host movies, then refuse to serve any content because you're not in the US. Google, in turn, pretends to serve results that are relevant to your location - and still give back tons of Hulu results regardless of where you are.
Re:iTunes is great (Score:4, Insightful)
... or ignore them. That's the most reasonable thing to do.
Re:iTunes is great (Score:2, Insightful)
I pirate pdf and djvu scans of out-of-print books, you insensitive clod!
Re:iTunes is great (Score:5, Insightful)
Since youtube probably gets like 1000 copyright infringement notices a day, does that mean they will punish their own service and put it at the bottom of the results?
Re:iTunes is great (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words: I want it exactly my way, under my terms, otherwise I'll just take it.
This is typical of the "Insightful" commentary on this site.
Well, there's something insightful in saying "you could package your product in such a way that I'd give you money, but oddly you're not packaging it that way". I'm certainly willing to pay for games/movies/whatever, and my willingness to pay is almost entirely influcenced by ease of acquisiton and use (price barely comes into it, though I won't be paying $10/episode for a TV show)
Re:what about themselves? (Score:4, Insightful)
My annoyance with Google & Youtube is now they eliminated "search video" as an option. It's "search youtube" which is annoying when I'm specifically trying to find Non-youtube video sites like vimeo or hulu or redtube.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22full+movie%22 [youtube.com] Thanks! You gave me something to watch this weekend. Of course the reality is many of those "full movies" are just 5 minute videos telling users to go visit some website (usually non-functional). Some of those "full movies" ask for a credit card when you try to watch them & therefore are legitimate/legal (for example American Reunion). That leaves very few actual pirated movies on youtube.
Re:iTunes is great (Score:0, Insightful)
No, it's not insightful because the mythical "package your product in such a way that I'd give you money" doesn't exist. No matter how close it gets, it won't be enough. Even if its exactly what you wanted, the goalposts will be moved again. The final stopper, of course is price. It's just a excuse to justify piracy.
When they say its not about the money, its always about the money.
Re:. . . The end of Google . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
so? it still returns the other results. Big deal if there are a few ads. For the record, I had 2 ads when I searched for "insurance"
Yeah, it was real hassled to move my mouse wheel to clicks before getting past the ads.
Re:iTunes is great (Score:2, Insightful)
Linux has Rhythmbox and Amarok which are equally bloated on top of having terrible user interfaces and terrible code bases.
Re:Great for rentals with caveats (Score:3, Insightful)
If the quality was lower, then piracy wouldn't be nearly as popular. The truth is that if the movie or TV show is on Blu-Ray, you can pirate it in Blu-Ray quality; actually since the mandatory FBI warning and any trailers are stripped, and since it is instantly accessible with no physical media, it's slightly better than owning the Blu-Ray. The only risk is getting caught, the odds of which are perceived to be very low, getting a virus of some sort, or wasting your time with a completely unrelated file, and those last two problems are virtually solved in the better communities.
Source: I am a filthy pirate, even though I've also bought maybe $30,000-35,000 worth of DVDs in my lifetime.
Re:iTunes is great (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a-okay because your feelings have been hurt
No, it's a-okay because artificial scarcity is a crock that causes huge amounts of harm. The amount of destroyed value is insane. Ignoring such idiocy is the sensible thing to do.
Re:what about themselves? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's interesting to see just how sociopathic Google is becoming now that they are in a position of dominance
Every public company is required, by law, to behave like a sociopath.
It's not Google's or any other company's fault. It is commercial law. Shareholders' interests come first.
People shouldn't waste their breath criticising Apple etc. for using slave labour in other countries. It's good for the shareholders, for the bottom line, so it is done. To decide NOT to take those opportunities - or to attempt to patent the rectangle, or spend millions on influencing politics - is reason for a CEO to be dropped. Another will be chosen - by shareholders - who doesn't mind behaving unethically.
If you want to blame something, blame the law. Blame the system of share trading, which rewards *any* behaviour that increases share value. Blame Joe Public for day trading and investing in companies that behave unethically (ie. most of them).
What's the point in blaming *the company itself* when it's only doing what it's programmed to do?
This is, of course, why companies are not "people". People make ethical decisions every day. A company behaves according to pre-determined rules, like an amoeba. I was going to say an animal, but animal behaviour is far more complex than company behaviour.