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posted by Cactus on Wednesday February 26 2014, @05:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't dept.

Fluffeh writes:

According to TorrentFreak, Google is downranking The Pirate Bay's website in its search results for a wide variety of queries, some of which are not linked to copyright-infringing content. Interestingly, the change mostly seems to affect TPB results via the Google.com domain, not other variants such as Google.ca and Google.co.uk.

It also seems that Google may only be downranking searches that are explicitly looking for copyright-infringing content, not searches that are simply looking for The Pirate Bay itself. It will be interesting to see whether this is a backhanded effort to appease the media companies, or a taste of things to come to all the Google domains.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Jerry Smith on Wednesday February 26 2014, @05:57PM

    by Jerry Smith (379) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @05:57PM (#7428) Journal

    Are you guys getting paid? Seems like every other thread has an advertisement for duckduckgo

    No, it's just that duckduckgo is getting a pretty big audience in Europe. So you just might have stumbled into some europeans :)

    --
    All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2014, @07:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2014, @07:27PM (#7486)

    "So you just might have stumbled into some europeans :)"

    Uh oh, ok be calm. When facing a German in the wild it is important to make yourself appear as large as possible, but don't make any loud noises as that could be mistranslated as an insult to their mothers.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2014, @07:45PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2014, @07:45PM (#7500)

      My hovercraft is full of eels.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Foobar Bazbot on Wednesday February 26 2014, @10:12PM

    by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @10:12PM (#7585) Journal

    I wonder if part of the appeal of ddg to Europeans is about it being based overseas from them; I know that's part* of why I, an American, choose ixquick/startpage over ddg... If I'm going to be snooped on, I'd rather it's by a government that can't directly affect me, and might not share everything with the government(s) that can.

    *To be specific, that was the initial part; I've developed a much stronger dislike of ddg, since I discovered that (1) they recommend you install their Firefox extension, instead of just adding a url to your search list and setting it as default, and (2) that that extension by default injects ddg content into google search results. Yes, you can turn off the content tampering, but IMO it's evil to engage in that behavior as a default, absent some clear sign from the user that they want non-ddg pages tampered with. (For example, hey could have made installing the extension a clear sign, by promoting the extension as a content-injecting option, instead of as a way to get ddg in the search box.

    • (Score: 1) by rts008 on Thursday February 27 2014, @06:04AM

      by rts008 (3001) on Thursday February 27 2014, @06:04AM (#7813)

      In regards to: "*To be specific..."
      Thanks, was not aware of that behavior from DDG, but was thinking about using them. I will remember about the extension if I decide to use them.

      BTW, thanks for the Greasemonkey script you linked to. I have been trying to find something in the 'pref.'s' to turned that nested crap off.(unsuccessful so far...)
      This will help a lot!

    • (Score: 1) by GeminiDomino on Thursday February 27 2014, @05:56PM

      by GeminiDomino (661) on Thursday February 27 2014, @05:56PM (#8069)

      Has ixquick sorted out their performance issues yet? I started using it after scroogle was killed off, but it was just horribly slow (I'm 30-45 second page loads) when it didn't timeout outright. Now I bounce between DDG and qrobe.it, but I'm still more than willing to give ixquick a spot in the rotation.

      --
      "We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
      • (Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday February 28 2014, @06:27AM

        by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Friday February 28 2014, @06:27AM (#8320) Journal

        Dunno, I don't recall ever seeing that sort of load times when my own connection wasn't flaky. (Then again, my connection was frequently flaky around that time period...)