Google no longer auto-suggesting The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites in search

Google no longer auto-suggests popular "piracy-related" terms

Google is taking its own preemptive approach to tackling online piracy by removing certain keywords from its auto-complete and Google Instant search features, reports TorrentFreak.

When users search for terms like ‘torrent’, ‘BitTorrent’ and ‘RapidShare’, or torrent sites terms like ‘thepiratebay’, ‘the pirate bay’, ‘isohunt’, ‘torrentreactor’, ‘btjunkie’, ‘kickasstorrents’, ‘sumotorrent’, ‘btmon’ and ‘extratorrent’, among others, relevant auto-complete suggestions and Google Instant search results are omitted.

Google’s newly updated blacklist also includes a number of file hosting or ‘cyberlocker’ sites like ‘4shared’, ‘filesonic’ and ‘fileserve’, which are often used to facilitate the illegal sharing of entertainment media and software.

While these piracy-related sites are filtered from certain Google Search features, they are still included as normal in Google’s search index.

It’s unclear as to why Google has taken this step, especially as they appear to be under no obligation. Google Music launched to the US public last week so perhaps this is their way of keeping friendly with copyright holders.

Meanwhile in related news, the European Court of Justice has determined that access to the internet is a human right and that under EU law internet service providers (ISPs) could not be forced to block users on their network to similar piracy-related sites.

Eircom, Ireland’s largest ISP, famously continues to enforce an out-of-court settlement with the Irish music industry preventing its network users from accessing The Pirate Bay – and which enabled Eircom to launch their own music service one year later.