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."
Re:What is a search engine? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Worse than that, by doing this, they're showing, legally, that they CAN do this. Which means the next time some RIAA shitwaffle decides to Google for their latest "Generic Movie Content" blockbuster and finds it, welp, that means it's Google's fault now...
Re:Wow. Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Getting into the content business will be the death of Google as an honest broker of information.
Pipedream of the day: (Score:3, Interesting)
Google will also start punishing site owners who make false claims.
Re:what about themselves? (Score:5, Interesting)
YouTube is full of pirated material nowadays, and it gets put back up as fast as it comes down, even with their automated systems. Here's a long list:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22full+movie%22 [youtube.com]
About 13,200,000 results, of which the vast majority are not there with copyright holder's permission. As to the adverts, those are making money for Google, not for the copyright holders, which is why they don't really care if the situation continues.
It's interesting to see just how sociopathic Google is becoming now that they are in a position of dominance, and have grown to be a large company. What's interesting about Google's position now is that because they dominate search, and yet make money from ads, the less effective the search is at finding things the better for them - it means they sell more ads to sites desperate to rank well again.
Re:iTunes is great (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you find 70s black sabbath?
The new paternalism (Score:2, Interesting)
Authorities such as major companies and governments have adopted a new paternalism: They know what is best for you, and will do it without your consent and often with transparency.
Consider the greatly diminished respect for privacy (e.g., the tracking and monitoring by government and corporations alike), for end-user control (authorities decide what software you can install, whether and when it updates, what websites you can visit, what files you can store, etc.).
From Apple to government, they claim it provides a better user experience. Your computer works better, you are more secure, etc. And they don't reveal what they know or are doing.
As long as the user experience is good, no one seems to mind.
Re:Wow. Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
... will be the death of Google as an honest broker of information.
They ceased being an honest broker when they filed their IPO. Look at Facebook; It went from an amazingly simple and useful website to a horribly bloated content platform that most of its users' dislike but can't quit it because all their friends are on it. Google has become like that: Everybody uses google services, but not because they're better, just that they're popular.
A lot of this crap is due to centralization; ICANN screwing up the DNS namespace in order to turn a buck, the UN screaming at them to give up control and all the politics that goes into that... Google becoming the de facto search engine, and then all the gaming of the system and inevitable government control over it (searching for certain terms while logged in, or sent from your IP address that you were previously logged in from can get you on a watch list now), etc. It seems that the moment a utility service online tries to 'monetize', it turns to shit.
It's clear that Google is reaching the end of its useful life as a search engine; It only continues to command marketshare now because of momentum and a lack of alternatives, not because it is innovative, efficient, or fair.
I imagine that in the not too distant future, someone will design a P2P content distribution network with onion routing and encryption similar to Tor, but capable of decentralized information storage similar to Freenet, we'll be a lot closer to seeing this business model going out of business.
On top of such a network, one would need to build a namespace resolution service; I would suggest it be based on geopolitical boundaries, followed by function, then unique name, but the organizational scheme doesn't matter as long as it is consistent and easy to navigate and update. Each sovereign entity would register its own key with the root service, and after that, they can do what they want... rather than ICANN, you'd have something more like international waters -- you can fly under any flag you want. Otherwise, have a .default namespace for services that do not want to fly a flag (pirates? Yarr!) ... The rest of the technical details I'm sure you can fill in.
After those two steps are done, the last would be an indexing service. Google had the right idea; The number of links to a given webpage is a good initial indicator of its value, with some massaging of the data to remove auto-generated pages, etc. But as an alternative to Google's bogosort method, I'd suggest a trust network; If A visits a lot of the same sites as B, then there's a reasonable chance that if B ranks a site positively, A will like it too, so give it a bump in the ratings. Do this enough and clusters of users will emerge automatically on the network. If you rate something badly, then the system lowers the implicit trust level. You can also explicitly trust certain identities, like friends or whatever... similar to how Slashdot has 'friends' and 'foes', but a bit more refined. That trust data doesn't have to be exchanged; After the search results are downloaded, the client would resort the data before pushing it up to the application.
I believe many people would happily trade a few extra seconds of search time and a higher bandwidth cost to use a search engine that was truly 'neutral' algorithmically, and used a trust network for rankings instead of Google's bogosort method. Obviously, my implimentation will have some problems, as any other pre-prototype idea would, but I think what I've described is useful enough as a starting point to thinking of a return to the roots of the internet; We've gotten trapped into thinking of everything as a client/server model, or as content platforms, and all making little islands out of our content. The web wasn't designed this way; It was explicitly designed to allow you to see an image on another person's website, and then link it on your own page. Copyright law screwed that u
Re:iTunes is great (Score:5, Interesting)
I've recently started using iTunes for music and movie rentals and it works flawlessly. So there's no justification of "no good legal alternatives" anymore, as both Spotify and iTunes are actually easier and nicer to use than pirate sites. The same goes for Steam.
Pop open your iTunes client and do a search for me....(because as far as I know iTunes doesn't run on Linux).
;)
I want you to search for a song I recall from my childhood. My father used to play it on his record player while working in the garage. Being just a kid at the time, I'd sit nearby hammering nails into his workbench while he crafted bookshelves for people. The song is 'Escape'. If something does come up, I guarantee it's wrong. The song I'm looking for is by Michael Garrison from his album "In the Regions of Sunreturn". Nothing? Try Googling for it. You might find a youtube video with the song, or maybe a sample on some music geek's website, but good luck getting a legitimate copy.
Michael Garrison is long dead, and a few years before my father unexpectedly passed away I noticed a copy of the record floating around ThePirateBay. I grabbed it, burned it to a CD and gave it to him on his birthday. He hadn't heard the song since his record collection was destroyed back in the 80s. I never saw him so happy to be listening to a CD. Thank God we have the RIAA to try and stop moments like those.
In the last 10 years I have run into that record twice in all my eBay, CraigsList, and Amazon searching.
So good luck. Once someone creates a fairly complete library of music, along with an easy way to BUY songs (not rent or borrow), and the prices are reasonable--I'll start using it. I'd hate for my kids to grow up and remember a song their dad played in their youth, only to find "Barbie Girl" unavailable and unplayable because it's DRM'd and backed by a bunch of sue-happy lawyers.
Oh--and I'm joking. I hate "Barbie Girl".
Re:what about themselves? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or just use Bing. Searching videos is one of the few things where it's actually vastly superior to Google video search. Live thumbnails are convenient to quickly filter out junk, and it seems to handle duplicates much better.
Re:. . . The end of Google . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Are the ads THAT big of a problem on Google's search results?
Searching for "Insurance" on my system with customized results gives me 3 ads. Two of those ads are already the top-2 ranked results, so it is just a redundant result. The Wikipedia article still shows up in the top-ten results. The top-ten results contained both local and national results, all of which have coverage in my area. Beside the results is a map of local insurance companies.
I'd say these are pretty damn quality results. I now know EXACTLY where in town I can go. Addresses and phone numbers are right on the results page, so I don't need to fight through each company's possibly horrible web interface to find their contact information. The Wikipedia article is on there too, so I can get information about what "Insurance" even is.
What more would you like from these results?
Re:iTunes is great (Score:4, Interesting)
And yet, Amazon has become the #2 music store by selling unencumbered MP3s that could be easily copied. In other words, they sell:
1. What people want
2. In a format they want
3. That plays on everything
4. Without DRM
And they are making millions doing it. You really should try it instead of breaking the internet.