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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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Wednesday July 12 2017, @11:50AM (1 child)
If the sites stream any legal movies (creative commons, public domain, etc), why should they not be listed. It's not a search engine's job to be the police, nor should it be.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:22PM
I would have thought having the "criminals" tagged, categorised, listed and on public display would be a gift for the police and lawyers. I mean, it's practically handing it on a plate to them. The lawyers should be thanking the likes of Google and giving them some of their spoils when they sue the crooks for billions.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:03PM (3 children)
As far as I can tell, this article does not in any way relate to the late Princess Diana. Why is the Express printing it?
(Score: 4, Funny) by isostatic on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:05PM (1 child)
Clearly it's a dastardly EU plot to "ruin our brexit"
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:02PM
And illegal immigrants Eating our Swans
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday July 12 2017, @06:11PM
Why is the Express printing something that is relevant? that would totally be against their commitment.
(Score: 3, Funny) by turgid on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:06PM
Q: What's the difference between the Daily Express and the Scottish Daily Express?
A: The Daily Express hates everyone. The Scottish Daily Express hates everyone and the English.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Interesting) by isostatic on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:07PM (1 child)
Thanks Express, I'd heard of pirate bay, but not of KickAss Torrents or 1337x.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 14 2017, @02:28AM
https://soylentnews.org/search.pl?tid=&query=kickass&author=&sort=3&op=stories [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:18PM (11 children)
I always used to get my Slackware ISOs using bittorrent but a few years ago something strange happened. My client would never seed. I could download but it would never upload. I never figured out why. Never had the time. There days I just use wget to download from one of the official mirrors. Oh well... I was thinking, a lot of ISPs throttle or block bittorrent since it is so frequently used for piracy (allegedly) and we can't have empowered Little People distributing data from their own systems even legally because next thing you know Marxist Revolution etc etc. What's the solution?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:30PM (5 children)
Buy Patrick beer and he'll mail you free Slackware ISO cd's for life.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday July 12 2017, @01:10PM (4 children)
I have a subscription. I get DVDs in the post :-)
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:59PM (3 children)
Subscription DVDs by post... There used to be a company called Netflix that did that; are they still in business? If so, do they have Slackware in their catalog?
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday July 12 2017, @08:33PM (2 children)
I usually order stickers and T-shirts too. Nothing quite as cool as an official Slackware T-shirt.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Thursday July 13 2017, @01:48PM (1 child)
I got the big "Bob" face on mine. :)
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 13 2017, @07:40PM
My one has Tux smoking the pipe.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:14PM
I think your guess is right. I can't run patches for my new Acer tablet or do a "repair" on this computer's Microsoft Office when Office stops running, even when the device is streaming music. Pretty sure Comcast is blocking a port Microsoft and Acer use. The only way to repair Office is to reinstall Windows. Not sure how to update the damned tablet! I've contacted Acer, but haven't heard back.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:21PM
In my household, the solution so far has been to find & use ISPs that still use the 'dumb pipe' approach. (They still exist, it just takes some persistent Web searches & checking physical local Yellow Pages/phonebooks to track them down.) There's enough congestion on the Internet these days that aside from a small percentage of downloads & 3-4+ simultaneous HD streams, there typically isn't a huge difference between my cheapo 6mbps DSL, my brother's Comcast & our father's 40mbps+ FTTN. Even if it did make a difference speed-wise, I'd much rather work around the limitation than give money to an ISP that interferes with my connection or otherwise treats me poorly — companies like that should put on a hat and walk into the Pacific Ocean until it floats.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:36PM (1 child)
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.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:36PM
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.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:14PM
Nice things about Bittorrent:
It does the checksums automatically.
If one segment fails, it will tell you which one so that you can download just that part again.
With wget, you have to do the checksum yourself.
...and, if there is an error, you have to start over again from zero.
So, yet another instance of a provider potentially screwing you on bandwidth.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:22PM (5 children)
So, out of curiosity, I did what the link said and ran "best torrent sites" on google.
It didn't give me a list, what it gave me is search results, and the top page was from torrentfreak, its "Top 10 most popular torrent sites", which it does every year ( https://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-popular-torrent-sites-of-2017-170107/ [torrentfreak.com] ) , the results of which is summarised on the google search page.
Now, from what I can see, all Google did was actually parse out the list on the page and provide a partial summary, not unlike how they do with news articles etc... Google isn't recommending torrent sites, they are not listing them for you either. What they are doing is providing search results that match the keywords. If your keywords are "best torrent sites" you are going to get relevant results.
Also, the torrentfreak site is not a piracy site, it is a news outlet dealing with P2P. I don't think you can demand Google censor a news outlet (not that I don't expect the little authoritarians to try their hardest), because that will become a real slippery slope quick. torrentfreak does not condone piracy, does not facilitate it, nor does it provide links to pirated content. All they do is issue news reports about what is going on in the area.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:31PM (4 children)
I'd say it is Google. Google is copying information listed on other websites, parsing it to understand the context, and redisplaying it in a convenient form on search queries. Often this comes in the form of a sidebar biography, but the horizontal list is also prominent.
Whether it came from TF or not is irrelevant. And I don't think TorrentFreak has created a list of recommended streaming sites that includes the likes of both Putlocker and Netflix.
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(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday July 12 2017, @03:09PM (3 children)
Odd... I didn't get any streaming sites myself. However this being google it might be that it shows us two different results. I sure never made use of streaming sites of any kind, but have used torrents in the past.
Well, Google does it, but I doubt they have explicitly coded out a list of top pirate sites. More like Google does this everywhere, and you will get summaries of pirate sites as much as you would any other site. My point is Google isn't deliberately doing this, it is a function of how their system works (whether their system should work that way or not is a different matter IMO). Plus I really don't think the Google algo is actually understanding the context, more like using heuristics to guess at what would be the most interesting data.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 12 2017, @03:48PM (2 children)
I get that GOOG is not deliberately doing this, hence "recommending" in the sumamry.
For me the "best torrent sites" [google.com] search in the summary creates a horizontal list with 1337x, Rarbg, The Pirate Bay, Torrent Project, isoHunt, ExtraTorrent, Demonoid, YourBittorrent, EZTV, Seedpeer, KickassTorrents, Torrentz, and ArenaBG in that order. Some of these are not on TorrentFreak's Jan. 2017 top 10 list, and some of TF's list are not listed by the Google search.
The "streaming sites" [google.com] search lists Putlocker, Alluc, Hulu, Crackle, Veoh, Viewster, Popcornflix, Netflix, Amazon Video, and Movie4k.to in that order.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:40PM
funny, one of my top results on that search link is the story that google is now listing the best torrent sites.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Wednesday July 12 2017, @05:18PM
I get 5 "Best Torrent Sites" articles from various sources, followed mostly by refeeds of this article. Interestingly, when I refresh the page, the percentage of refeeds increases as more sites pick up the story, gradually blocking out the other content.
It's like watching a virus spread, only with the data presented in a linear format.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:47PM (1 child)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday July 12 2017, @06:20PM
Force people to install and setup the TCP/IP stack themselves and use text-only clients. That usually filters away a lot of eternal September people :p
(Score: 1) by crafoo on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:57PM (2 children)
Why shouldn't a search engine just do what you ask with the information available (index of the internet)? That would be it's most useful state. Add on top of that -user- adjustable settings for types of information you would like to filter out.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:37PM (1 child)
Given the sheer amount of spammy sites out there, I doubt that the kind of index search engines we used to have would function well... So at this point, I wish they'd let users have a personalized blocklist to prevent spam sites from appearing in results, and add an option to ban the sites that were most commonly blocked by users.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:46PM
I wish they'd let users have a personalized blocklist
If, by "they", you mean Google, that exists.
You may have seen Google links with "cse" in the URL.
That stands for Custom Search Engine. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:39PM (2 children)
I only search for torrents when I need a movie or TV show. I'm shocked that people pirate music though... That's real art.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @03:52PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDZX4ooRsWs [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday July 13 2017, @09:11AM
So your position is that copyright is legitimate, but you don't like movies and TV, so in those particular cases it's morally ok to infringe copyrights?