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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 12 2017, @11:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the deluge-of-choices dept.

Google has been found to "recommend" torrent and unauthorized streaming sites in response to search queries:

Google is an excellent search engine. The company does its best to present users with relevant information wherever it can. With a reel of popular torrent sites, for example, when users search for it. Or a handy overview of streaming sites such as Netflix, Hulu, Putlocker and Movie4k.to. Whether Hollywood will appreciate this service doubtful though.

[...] When you type in "best torrent sites" or just "torrent sites," Google.com provides a fancy reel of several high traffic indexers.

The search engine displays the names of sites such as RARBG, The Pirate Bay and 1337x as well as their logo. When you click on this link, Google brings up all results for the associated term.

While it's a thought provoking idea to think that Google employees are manually curating the list, the entire process is likely automated. Still, many casual torrent users might find it quite handy. Whether rightsholders will be equally excited is another question though.

The automated nature of this type of search result display also creates another problem. While many people know that most torrent sites offer pirated content, this is quite different with streaming portals.

This leads to a confusing situation where Google lists both legal and unauthorized streaming platforms when users search for "streaming sites."

The screenshot below shows the pirate streaming site Putlocker next to Hulu and Crackle. The same lineup also rotates various other pirate sites such as Alluc and Movie4k.to.

This has SHOCKED Express, which has loudly warned about the UK "Kodi" menace in recent months.


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  • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:36PM (1 child)

    by deimtee (3272) on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:36PM (#538157) Journal

    If your ISP is blocking, Just go into your torrent client prefs and set a non-standard port. That usually fixes it.
    Having said that, it may just be that you are getting swamped by seeders with massive upload pipes. Whenever I download a new distro, always via torrent, I hardly ever upload anything. There are usually lots of seeders with fast university/corporate connections, and not many leeches. You should still use bittorrent so that you save your favorite distro's bandwidth.

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  • (Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:36PM

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:36PM (#538256) Journal

    Having said that, it may just be that you are getting swamped by seeders with massive upload pipes.

    Interesting. I always used to use the command line version of BitTornado that came on the Slackware disks. However, I just found a newer one called Transmission [transmissionbt.com] which I've just compiled and I'm trying it out now (with the Gtk+ GUI). There are currently about 50 peers and almost all of them are purely seeding so it's no wonder I'm not uploading anything.