Google preemptively banned hundreds of millions of 'pirate' URLs last year

Yandex is incredible for things that Google and Bing serves up useless spam for.<p>If you search “watch $MOVIE free” on google you’re going to get netflix, Hulu, prime, Disney etc as the first results regardless of whether those sites even have it in their library. The remaining links are SEO spam that also don’t have it but pretend they do, because the sites that actually do have all been struck or filtered.<p>Yandex on the other hand… the first result is generally exactly what you wanted in 720 or 1080 with no BS.<p>I do miss when google had a little footer that said “click here to view URLs that were removed due to copyright takedown requests”.<p>Edit: And I do pay for all of those streaming services and more, but in Canada if a franchise has 5 movies it’s not unheard of to have #1 on Netflix, #2 on Paramount, #3 on no service available here, and #4 and #5 on Disney or Crave. It’s the same with seasons of TV series: exhausting.

Title feels quite misleading. This doesn&#x27;t seem to have been Google itself going out of its own way to ban URLs as the title suggests, but rather the copyright holders submitting the Google takedown form before the content was indexed, as opposed to afterward.<p>&gt; “Search accepts notices for web pages that are not even in our index at the time of submission. Nevertheless, we will proactively block such web pages from appearing in our Search results and will apply these notices to our demotion signal.&quot;

“For over two decades, we have observed that unmet consumer demand is a key driver of piracy. If demand is unmet by legitimate supply, users will seek pirated content. That is why one of the best ways to combat piracy is to provide better, more convenient, and legitimate alternatives,” Google writes.<p>Children will be childed by Google. Define: &quot;piracy&quot;. Now, who should enforce ... piracy.<p>Google is a search engine and some other stuff - they should never, ever be involved in enforcement, let alone unilaterally involved in it and allowed to trumpet the same.<p>Law enforcement does law enforcement and not Google. If I was a policeman I would be absolutely incensed at this overreach into my domain.

I sometimes wonder why computer-literate people still use Google Search. Basically for all search queries I can imagine, DuckDuckGo or Yandex consistently give much better results.

I wonder if this is also hitting things like right-to-repair; a lot of useful information like service manuals and schematics are almost certainly in the realm of piracy, and I&#x27;ve noticed they&#x27;ve become a lot harder to find recently.

This bans hasn&#x27;t nothing to do with pirate sites that have scams and deceptive design patterns? The last time I visited the pirate bay without ublock origin, I was bombarded with ads with scummy copy like &quot;you won x&quot; or &quot;stream for free now&quot;, fake search results, adult ads, and deceptive invisible clickable areas on top of the UI that opened new tabs with suspicious full page ads.<p>I never followed those links but I&#x27;m sure that it will ended up on installing malware or asking for credit cards.<p>I will understand if the Google Search algorithm de-ranks or bans sites like that, many people totally will fall to this scams.

And removes them from saved links<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;google-removes-pirate-sites-from-users-privately-saved-links-230830&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;google-removes-pirate-sites-from-us...</a>

Interestingly, this implies the people sending notices to google have a fresher index than google does.<p>Is the pirate bay still a thing, or is there some new competitor? (It’s possible the copyright holders are running their own crawlers, but that seems unlikely and also easy to block)

and this is my recent struggle with google search: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigmemes99.funnyjunk.com&#x2F;pictures&#x2F;I+hate+google+so+much+its+unreal_5b9791_10853615.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigmemes99.funnyjunk.com&#x2F;pictures&#x2F;I+hate+google+so+m...</a>

YouTube and other Google-operated services should do their best to crack down on piracy, such as the uploading of television programs. It&#x27;s ridiculous that they only show off their &quot;justice&quot; that no one asks for on sites that they can&#x27;t monetize.

I&#x27;m sure it helps some but pirate sites are all about word of mouth &#x2F; sharing with friends

This is a betrayal of Google&#x27;s mission statement, &quot;to organize the world&#x27;s information and make it universally accessible and useful&quot;. It can be credibly argued that the DMCA requires Google to do this for allegedly-infringing indexed URLs. Nothing requires them to do this for unindexed URLs.

Is it possible to file a FOIA to get the domains and build a uncensored version?

Trying to corner the market with Google Drive

Google result is annoying, the same as all video contents there (interuppted intentionally by Ads).<p>The whole Ads crap is broking my soul hard.

URLs that Google banned show up on Bing just fine. Another nail on the coffin.

Off-topic but: Does anyone know of a way to support TorrentFreak other than disabling adblock? They run next to no ads, don&#x27;t have a donation form or paid offering, and yet have been a major source of news in &quot;Big Tech vs Piracy&quot; battles.

it might be more than that.. here in the USA I typed &quot;Serbia News&quot; into youtube and got only Albanian and Slovak sites.. only two months ago, I did the same and I did get TV news in Serbia.. I wanted to know more about the northern border expansion of course, from both sides.. and what I got instead is predictable and disappointing in a &quot;free&quot; press environment<p>secondly, the only time I have ever gotten a suspicious pause in Google translate, was relating to this area in those languages..