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You are assuming that having takedown notices does not correlate with a lack of quality. I don't have any inside information about this change in particular, b

You are assuming that having takedown notices does not correlate with a lack of quality. I don't have any inside information about this change in particular, but I'd guess that is a bad assumption. I'd bet that indeed, this signal is useful to predict search quality on some set of traffic, and that's why Google is using it. There tends to be a high bar to meet to push out search quality changes at Google.

onli 14y ago
Even in the announcement, it's about "legitimate, quality sources". Legitimate comes first, it is there combined with quality, but in reality it isn't. The best videohosters out there aren't legitimate in the eyes of the copyright-holders. How high quality is the linked and praised npr.org, which incorporates Youtube-Videos which arent playable "from some websites", including npr.org [1] (from my ip at least)? I don't have the data. I can't have. But according to the argumentation of the announcement itself and my own judgement regarding the sites in question, this is not a "search quality change" with a high bar to meet, done by engineers wanting to improve the results. I bet this comes from lawyers, (internal?) politics or pressure from the copyright-industry. [1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/08/09/158525288/muses-matt-bellamy-on-his-bands-ridiculous-ly-awesome-olympic-anthem?ps=mh_frhdl1 http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/08/09/158525288/muse...
- magicalist 14y ago
  You don't have to pontificate on semantics, you can just see the list of sites that receive the most takedown links: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/?r=all-time http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/... that list does correlate rather well with spammy content (stuffed links and lots of flash ads and popups), it just also happens to correlate well with sites you're looking for when you want a torrent. As long as they're still indexing these sites, they're probably still going to come up if you add "torrent" to your query, so I don't really see the problem. The reality is, when most people are looking for a video, they are looking to find it on an official site, and not a streaming video site from china or a torrent site with 18 "download" buttons, none of which links to the actual torrent file download (it's in the plain text link). As long as they can still find the other content, you're still meeting everyone's needs and you've probably upped average searcher satisfaction. Now, geographic restrictions on video playback would be a great search signal to incorporate (would googlebot start trying to play videostreams, though?). That shit is really annoying.
  - barista 14y ago
    Does this account for takedown notices received by youtube by itself? No.
Devilboy 14y ago
I bet Youtube gets more takedown notices than just about any other site. Are they going to delist Youtube?
barista 14y ago
If you see the list of sites that Google has received notices for, http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/?r=all-time http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/... The torrent sites and file sharing sites are aplenty in there. Are you saying they are low quality? It kinda seems obvious that the site that has the best torrents/files will have the highest quality and hence receive the most takedown notices.

onli 14y ago

Even in the announcement, it's about "legitimate, quality sources". Legitimate comes first, it is there combined with quality, but in reality it isn't. The best videohosters out there aren't legitimate in the eyes of the copyright-holders. How high quality is the linked and praised npr.org, which incorporates Youtube-Videos which arent playable "from some websites", including npr.org [1] (from my ip at least)? I don't have the data. I can't have. But according to the argumentation of the announcement itself and my own judgement regarding the sites in question, this is not a "search quality change" with a high bar to meet, done by engineers wanting to improve the results. I bet this comes from lawyers, (internal?) politics or pressure from the copyright-industry. [1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/08/09/158525288/muses-matt-bellamy-on-his-bands-ridiculous-ly-awesome-olympic-anthem?ps=mh_frhdl1 http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/08/09/158525288/muse...

magicalist 14y ago
You don't have to pontificate on semantics, you can just see the list of sites that receive the most takedown links: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/?r=all-time http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/... that list does correlate rather well with spammy content (stuffed links and lots of flash ads and popups), it just also happens to correlate well with sites you're looking for when you want a torrent. As long as they're still indexing these sites, they're probably still going to come up if you add "torrent" to your query, so I don't really see the problem. The reality is, when most people are looking for a video, they are looking to find it on an official site, and not a streaming video site from china or a torrent site with 18 "download" buttons, none of which links to the actual torrent file download (it's in the plain text link). As long as they can still find the other content, you're still meeting everyone's needs and you've probably upped average searcher satisfaction. Now, geographic restrictions on video playback would be a great search signal to incorporate (would googlebot start trying to play videostreams, though?). That shit is really annoying.
- barista 14y ago
  Does this account for takedown notices received by youtube by itself? No.

Devilboy 14y ago

I bet Youtube gets more takedown notices than just about any other site. Are they going to delist Youtube?

barista 14y ago

If you see the list of sites that Google has received notices for, http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/?r=all-time http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/... The torrent sites and file sharing sites are aplenty in there. Are you saying they are low quality? It kinda seems obvious that the site that has the best torrents/files will have the highest quality and hence receive the most takedown notices.