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Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results citing Dutch court order
- derekpankaew 5y agoThe headline is a bit misleading. Google's only removing Pirate Bay from Netherland results, not global results, due to a local court order. That makes a lot of sense - Google complies with local laws in many countries.
- new_guy 5y agoNow if they'd only do the same with actual spam sites, see also related-ish discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29403947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29403947
- yosito 5y agoDoes anyone else remember actually believing that Google's mission was to "organize the world's information and make it accessible"? That seems so naive now. It's become painfully obvious that Google's mission is to manipulate access to information for profit.
- corin_ 5y agoSupermarkets organise food and make them accessible [to paying customers], as does (not with food this time) a private library. Sure their way of wording it makes it possible to read it naively as being altruistic, but technically I don't think they're not organising the world's data and making it accessible. Just perhaps not always in the way the world would most appreciate.
- pleb_nz 5y agoSounds more like back scratching
- watermelon0 5y agoRegardless of your opinion on piracy, I think Google (and ISPs) should not moderate search results. Basically, search engines are used to find things publicly available on the internet, policing should be done on the actual hosts of the content. Same goes for ISPs, they are here to provide access to publicly available computers, without interfering with the content or accessibility.
- londons_explore 5y agoI would like to see Google highlight legally removed search results. For example, leave a gap in the search results where the missing one would have been, perhaps with some details of the result which do not fall under the removal request (for example, the title of the page, even if the URL must be removed).
- taneq 5y agoAdd this to the long list of things that Google won't do for the exact reason that you want them to do it. They're not on your side any more and haven't been for a decade now.
- briga 5y agoIn principle I agree but in this case I think Google is trying to protect itself from lawsuits. Which seems like a reasonable thing to do from their perspective. Any search engine that gets big enough will eventually have a target on its back for DMCA trolls
- southerntofu 5y ago> I think Google is trying to protect itself from lawsuits That is unlikely. Google breaks many privacy-related laws across the globe and deals with billions of euros of fines regularly. They have an unlimited wallet and couldn't care less about spending a few billions to extend their dominance over the Internet.
- 5y ago
- phendrenad2 5y agoin the Netherlands, following a court order
- deadalus 5y ago>The order targets ISPs and doesn't name Google but the company chose to voluntarily comply.
- postsantum 5y agoJust a coincidence that Google goes all out on following the law in the country it uses for tax evading
- danmaz74 5y agoUnfortunately it's not tax evading, as it's legal.
- luluganeta 5y agoIt is legal, yet it is still tax evasion, even if one uses euphemisms like "tax optimization" and so on.
- toyg 5y agoTalking about the distinction between tax evasion and tax avoidance was when I really understood the power of controlling language, and why the ruling classes strive for getting their kids educated since the dawn of time.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- HPsquared 5y agoThere are two terms because they are different things: one is illegal and generally involves other illegal things such as fraud, while the other is legal 'gaming the system'. Gaming is not the same as cheating.
- qwerty456127 5y agoIs there a list of the sites Google de-listed somewhere? I'm pretty sure (in fact I knew some, but I can't remember) it included some interesting and totally legal websites.
- Aulig 5y agoThe Lumen Database collects DMCA requests Google receives, but the URLs are not always visible.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MushyRoom 5y agoThe easiest way is to look here at the transparency report [1]. Which makes it easy to find new Piracy websites [2]. It only mentions the TLD not the URL https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/overview https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/overview https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/request/12803156 https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/request/1280...
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoI went straight to 'rabbitmp3s' and pirated "Ironic" by Alanis Morissette. That site makes it really easy to download mp3s. Thanks google!
- dane-pgp 5y agoIt's a free ride when you've already paid.
- qwerty456127 5y agoThere also are websites Google delisted voluntarily which had nothing to do with copyright infringement or anything illegal. I'm also curious about these.
- CyberShadow 5y agoTitle is editorialized by submitter. Actual title: "Google Removes Pirate Bay Domains from Search Results Citing Dutch Court Order".
- nosianu 5y agoIt is accurate though and it's an important detail. The headline makes it sound as if Google was ordered, which is not the case. > The order targets ISPs and doesn't name Google but the company chose to voluntarily comply. does allow changing the title sometimes: HN guidelines do allow changing the title on one condition: > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. The original title is misleading, leading one to believe Google was ordered.
- sct202 5y agoConsidering how often Google gets slapped with billion dollar fines in the EU, I'm not surprised they're voluntarily complying.
- CyberShadow 5y agoThis is subjective to my non-native English skill, but I found the editorialized title much more misleading. "Voluntarily" to me meant with zero obligation or coercion, explicit or implied, from any authority, i.e. doing it out of their sense of duty or something like that. Happy to compromise on that both titles are not ideal :)
- lolive 5y agoThe legal department of Google is probably doing that to avoid a second court decision, targetting them directly.
- dustintrex 5y agoNot really? The original title is careful to say "citing court order", not "per court order" etc. If anything, I think your title is more editorialized, since Google is clearly doing this for legal reasons, not exactly "voluntarily".
- roosgit 5y agoNow how can we get a court order against Pinterest?
- ckastner 5y agoA good start would be to know why Google doesn't already penalize their rankings, as they have done with many others who have gamed their rankings. Yes, Pinterest does SEO like anyone else, but their ranking seems just outrageously overvalued.
- rasz 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Silbermann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Silbermann is all you need to know
- texasbigdata 5y agoSo the CEO working at google previously many years ago is the key unlock? Not clear how this is helpful.
- rasz 5y agoIts not clear to you how having friends at a place selling ads helps you generate ~500mil/quarter of ad revenue and not get banned despite being a garbage stolen content farm?
- exikyut 5y ago> Career > Before Pinterest (which launched in March 2010), Silbermann worked at Google in the online advertising group.[6] However, after a short time with the company he left and started designing his own iPhone apps with a college friend, Paul Sciarra. After their initial application, Tote, failed to gain significant traction,[7] the cofounders teamed up with Evan Sharp to create a pinboard product that would eventually be named Pinterest.[6] Silbermann says that the genesis of Pinterest really came from his love of collecting as a kid. "Collecting tells a lot about who you are," he said, and when they looked at the web "there wasn't a place to share that side of who you were."[8] A little over nine years after starting Pinterest, the company held its IPO in April 2019 which valued the company around 12 billion dollars beating expectations.
- LightG 5y agoThat's totally going to have an impact.
- mschuster91 5y agoI'm always amazed that there are still people actively using torrents, given that even for popular software like Windows LTSB/LTSC there are virtually no well-seeded torrents on TPB and the music market has been pretty much eliminated by Spotify.
- ElectronShak 5y agodepends on where you live probably, and how accessible things are on the internet for you...including how easy it is to make payments on the internet for you. Torrents are a blessing otherwise.
- southerntofu 5y agoExcept there's still so much content you don't find on commercial platforms, and even when you find it it may disappear from one day to the next due to evolving contracts between shareholders and the platform. Also, streaming from a big multinational corporation works fine in well-connected areas but is a terrible experience on the country side and in the Global South. Where your connection to AWS/Google/Netlify is measured in Kb/s, torrents are a blessing because it spreads the load across several routes (including more local ones, because cloud providers are really slow from eg. Africa) and you can leave the downloads running all night. Torrents and other content-addressed systems are by far technically superior to centralized location-addressed systems like HTTP.
- klibertp 5y agoWell, looking at the E-books category, I can see quite a few well-seeded entries... unfortunately, most of them seems to be focused on finding G spot and/or having great oral sex (not saying that's not valuable, but!) Almost nothing that caught my attention, and having no sub-categories in E-books means that for every title I find I'd have to wade through pages upon pages of irrelevant results... Would be nice to know the alternative. Downloading everything and then deleting things that you realize you didn't actually want (after looking at the full contents) was a quite convenient UX.
- IceWreck 5y ago
- supperburg 5y agoGoogle search sucks, has demonstrated political bias through deliberate intervention and has become dominated by direct and indirect advertising. And now they are just removing shit.
- concinds 5y agoGoogle Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget Chrome. Google willingly interferes, in a heavy-handed way, with both search suggestions and search results, with both Google Search and YouTube. Just try to look up any topic on YouTube, and you'll have to get past the hundreds of mainstream media channels covering the event, before you actually find the original video. They artificially promote "authoritative sources" which are anything but, since they may be second-hand coverage of original videos that get buried in search results. Google's results are not only manipulated by clever SEO people[0], but by employees[1], in direct contradiction to Sundar Pichai's sworn testimony. Some of that is very defendable. But there's zero transparency. Given their search monopoly, and that most people aren't aware that search results are manipulated, Google Search is the web. Websites that get delisted are presumed to have ceased to exist. Focusing on browsers (Firefox) is good, but no longer enough. That's why Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Switch to other engines. DuckDuckGo, Brave Search are the ones I trust, and there's tons more. [0]: how many times have you tried looking for a machine's user manual, mistyped the model number, and somehow "found" a webpage with the manual for a product that didn't exist? and then modified the model number further and found more results from the same website, with relevant keywords and yet another incorrect model number? My understanding of SEO isn't good enough to know how they do that. I don't believe websites can dynamically alter their index to show up for so many typoed search queries. [1]: https://medium.com/@mikewacker/googles-manual-interventions-in-search-results-a3b0cfd3e26c https://medium.com/@mikewacker/googles-manual-interventions-...
- agumonkey 5y agoIsn't it an unavoidable social phenomenon ? as soon as any system / company starts to have weight in the group, they will face requests of accountability and responsability. They may try to use the "we're just the messenger" but it doesn't work often.
- Xelbair 5y agoSimple, if company works only as a messenger they will be left alone. They just present user content, and leave users to find their content. As soon as they introduce their own bias(curating content, recommendations, emergence of so called "walled gardens") it opens the floodgates.
- mountainb 5y agoI think the standard that I want to see service providers is "force me to do it, or I'm not going to do it." Get a court order. Get a warrant. Kick down my door. Sue me. Subpoena me. Stop rolling over without even getting a treat for it; it's pathetic.
- dredmorbius 5y agoIn fairness, there are gradations of response. I'd like for search engines to be highly and independently responsive to CP, spam, SEO gaming, fraud, malware, cyberstalking, cyberbullying, revenge pr0n,and similar threats. Relying on court orders would simply be too slow. I'd also like for search engines to be responsive to propaganda and disinformation. This calls for a much more nuanced response than the first category, and is inherently political rather than merely criminal. In the case of general copyright claims, specific targeted removals if executed reasonably and fairly, which quite arguably YouTube's ContentID is not, as an example, should be possible with a fairly minimal degree of legal mechanism (e.g., DMCA 512 takedowns under US law). Though that process should be amended to reduce abusive exploitation of such measures. Delisting entire domains for copyright infringement absent a specific legal action ... moves into much stickier waters. Ultimately, torrent sites will likely have to provide their own well-known search alternative which is resistant to such threats. I'd like to see that possibility further developed. (I'm aware that many such sites already claim the legal shield of serving as directories to content, not as hosters of that content themselves, which would inlcude The Pirate Bay itself.) Widespread global civil disobedience in the face of overwhelmingly asymmetric and self-serving copyright legislation and case law is among the very few avenues the average citizenry have of voicing opposition to such laws. And that fact alone should carry great weight. I'd like for search engines to be strongly resistant to removals based on overly-broad copyright claims,
- 2-718-281-828 5y agoyandex.com for the win. thank me l8r.
- nick__m 5y agoI was about to say the exact same thing in a more verbose way ! yandex.com is seriously awesome for infosec related searches and I guess (it's been a few years since I had to pirate something) that it's equally great for pirated content.
- 2-718-281-828 5y agoguess where I found the streams for all portlandia episodes which I happen to watch just now.
- authed 5y agoAlso great for searching by image
- squarefoot 5y agoTo me the ideal alternative should be something that aggregates results from major search engines, like DDG already does with Bing and Startpage with Google, but applied to a lot more search engines, then takes the results returned from all of them and builds the results page uniq'ing them so that if link A appears in 3 search engines and link B in 1 and link C in 6, the result will be 3 different links anyway. That way, if one link is censored from one search engine, it could still be present in the list in a similar rank for being returned anyway by other search engines.
- fault1 5y agoSounds like the old metacrawler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler The problem is that the indexes (google, bing, yandex) won't let you freely aggregate them anymore. DDG is a client of Microsoft just like startpage is a client of google.
- T3RMINATED 5y agoGoogle Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget Chrome.
- formvoltron 5y agoOh noes! I'm going to have a hard time remembering thepiratebay10.org
- DrBazza 5y agoI can think of other terms that Google should de-list that are far more harmful to society than a hooky copy of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Google is a private company can do what they want, but this is still a pretty poor decision.
- k8sToGo 5y agoThis they delist, but all the garbage spam sites they do not delist "voluntarily"?
- tiepoul 5y agoIs there any existing decentralized search engine? I do believe that Google should not interfere with the listing. Even if it's piracy, it should not take any people's freedom to discover different information catered for the people.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoand it's not piracy in all countries. Not all countries are the USA.
- fsflover 5y ago> decentralized search engine https://yacy.net https://yacy.net
- KoftaBob 5y agoOn a somewhat related note: are there good options in terms of P2P/distributed torrent search engines, which would make it so that websites like the Pirate Bay don't even need to exist? Instead, that distributed index of torrents could be searched directly from the torrent clients.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoThis is why using alternatives is important.
- jug 5y agoGoogle already acts upon DMCA requests, delisting sites if requested. They add a small note to the end of their results to inform you if the page should normally have had more search hits. So this raises so many questions. Has _no party_ requested to delist TPB under DMCA?! That sounds incredible if true. But the only explanation I have for Google feeling like they need to go this far, delisting on their own initiative! It's like a scenario that should never have to happen, and something they should never do either. So what's going on here? Update: Ugh, editorialization... Apparently court has been involved here and while Google may not be individually targetted and forced YET, so "voluntary", it's easy to see how Google see the writing on the wall and choose to comply. No point in fighting this with such a clear cut DMCA violation. But in this case I'm still surprised it took this long!
- Stevvo 5y agoWhen delisting for DMCA requests they don't delist the whole site, only results pointing to specified infringing torrents.
- 3pt14159 5y agoPeople will freak out about this, but I'm not worried. Search has this whack-a-mole find-the-pointer-to-the-pointer problem where unless you're going to up the state control at China levels it's essentially pointless. If you can't find the torrent site, you Google enough to find a community that will link to it. If you can't, you ask on Twitter. Etc. Etc. It's never going to stop someone determined. Credible threats of jail-time may, but these minor changes by Google and others aren't going to change anything important.
- fortyseven 5y agoThe anti-piracy crowd is big on "speed bumps". They know they can't stop piracy, but they can make it a pain in the ass and hope you'll get frustrated and give up.
- jonathanstrange 5y agoThey're unlikely to succeed, though. They've been trying for decades and it's still easier to pirate most content than it is to buy or rent it.
- chmod775 5y agoLooking at my internet history, I hardly even use Google Search anymore compared to before. Five years ago I would still google pretty much any error message or problem. Nowadays I typically go to directly to the project's GitHub and search through issues there, go directly to their documentation, or just browse the code from my editor and figure stuff out myself. I have like 15 tabs just corresponding to the stuff I'm working on right now. It is pathetic Google managed to become so awful they managed to undo a decade of conditioning. Crippling their search intentionally even more won't help.
- rasengan 5y agoYou could try https://private.sh https://private.sh which decouples the search allowing it to be end to end encrypted without anyone knowing both who you are and what you searched for.
- lexapro 5y agoGoogle itself is a torrent search engine. Just google <anything> filetype:torrent So when is Google going to delist Google?
- SirensOfTitan 5y agoGreat, glad Google has its priorities straight. Nevermind the rampant fraud that exists on their search engine like fake locksmith scams that they've done absolutely nothing about for years.
- pnt12 5y agoAlso that straight forward searches with an exact product or website name get their first result high jacked by the top bidder, forcing you to sell ads to users who are exactly looking for your site!
- dang 5y agoPlease don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. They're predictable and tedious and usually turn nasty. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Bud 5y agoWhy was the headline on this article re-written in an obviously biased way? Wasn't the original, factual headline good enough?
- throwawaymanbot 5y agoGoogle Search has been unusable for a long time now. I cant remember the last time I used it. They are a company about Adverts now. Nothing else.
- cardosof 5y agoGoogle is a media company. You can call it tech or adtech, it will never hide the fact that they want to get your eyeballs to look at the highest paying ad with the minimum effort. And they want to keep running this operation with the least amount of friction - the kind of comes when streaming companies are paying for search ads bidding with movie titles just to have their ads a few clicks away from an "unofficial" movie source.
- arepublicadoceu 5y agoGoogle has been on this crusade against piracy for awhile now. I first noticed when I tried to do this query a few months, years(?) ago: site:[famous non western tracker].com [insert music here] zero results. Same query, on duckduckgo: Everything there. Another query: [famous ebook sharing sites] on google. Non-related results Same query on duckduckgo: First hit is the correct website.
- dvngnt_ 5y agoI use DDG for normal searches, but when I actually need to find something i'll use google. One example is i like chill hop radio. whenever i search on DDG might get results, but google will usually send me directly to their bandcamp page which the the ideal result
- GordonS 5y agoAround a year ago Google also delisted bluelight.org, which is a well-known site for recreational drug users - and it's focused on harm reduction It will still show results if you explicitly use `site:bluelight.org`, otherwise it never appears in search results - prior to Google delisted it, it always ranked very highly (top 5). I can't help but wonder about the harm that decision had made - people may well have literally died because of it.
- throwawaysea 5y agoGoogle de-listing websites reminds me of that episode of Black Mirror where everyone is wearing AR lenses and the person who just came out of prison or whatever is not visible to anyone else but is instead a red mosaic when seen through their lenses. He's effectively blacklisted in the physical world. Google (and other tech giants) have tremendous influence and power - as much or more than most governments. It is very dangerous that they act the way they act. We need to heavily regulate them or build public alternatives that are beholden to laws like the First Amendment.
- gerash 5y agoThere are so many armchair activists here who say this company should do this and that and ignore a local law. I wonder if they'd say the same if they were the ones who would be fined/prisoned for breaking those laws. The fix is to change the law, not asking companies to break them