Walk The Plank With Google!!

The Pirate Bay Down-ranked in Google Search Results

The search engine downranks The Pirate Bay’s site in its search results for many queries. The sad thing about this is that some of those queries aren’t linked to copyright-infringing material. The weird thing is that the change affected tracker’s results via the Google.com domain, not its other mirrors like Google.ca and Google.co.uk.

Within the past few years the copyright owners have been asking the tech giant to activate its anti-piracy efforts. Now they may be happy as Google started to implement a number of new anti-piracy measures in response. For instance, Google is now filtering “piracy-related” terms from its AutoComplete and Instant services.

Entertainment industry demanded that Google downrank copyright-infringing portals and take them off the top results. Google promised to comply, but there was little evidence to back that up. The industry experts decided to find out how accessible The Pirate Bay is in Google and ran a few tests of their own. It turned out that the search engine is currently downranking the most-used torrent website, but The Pirate Bay is far from completely gone.

If you type “The Pirate Bay” or “TPB” in Google search, its address will come up as the first result. The same works for several related searches. However, the results are different for queries like “Twilight dvdrip“. For these keywords the largest BitTorrent tracker won’t show up on the first pages of the search results, but other popular torrent websites still show up.

Although these tests don’t actually prove that any downranking is going on, it seems weird that the The Pirate Bay is absent from results. The researchers decided to take unique content to The Pirate Bay and let Google search for that. As expected, The Pirate Bay didn’t show in the top results when the phrase from the site’s help section was searched on Google.com. Instead, the first result was The Pirate Bay’s proxy.

Apparently, individual tracker pages are being downranked by Google. This can be confirmed by the fact that the search results do show The Pirate Bay as the first result on other Google domains, including Google.ca and Google.co.uk, but not on Google.com. The conclusion can be made that the downranking for that phrase only happens on the .com domain.