We’re sure at one point or the other, we’ve tried to look for songs, books, movies, and more for download illegally via Google. However as you might have noticed, some of your search results have been removed due to takedown requests and because some sites have been flagged as piracy websites.
This was one of the ways Google had combated piracy back in 2012, but it looks like the company is taking it one step further and have recently announced via their Public Policy Blog that they will be making some changes. According to Google, “We’ve now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites. This update will roll out globally starting next week.”
Google has also stated that they will be removing more terms from autocomplete based on DMCA removal notices. “We’ve begun demoting autocomplete predictions that return results with many DMCA demoted sites.” With these new changes, it seems that Google will be making combating piracy more efficient.
Google claims to have received 224 million takedown requests last year, and apparently each request takes about six hours to handle. With the new algorithm, hopefully it becomes less easy for users to search for pirated content, thus making it more efficient.