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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: 4, Insightful) by X1 on Wednesday February 26 2014, @08:17PM

    by X1 (1221) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @08:17PM (#7531)

    The signs have been obvious for a while now, and the evolution is clear too: Google is becoming too big. With that size comes the arrogance of thinking they can do anything they want. This includes re-ordering search results as they see fit,

    You had me, but then you lost me. Sorry, much as I've got plenty o hate for the Goog, "re-ordering search results as they see fit" happens to be their first and original J-O-B. If they weren't doing that from the start, they wouldn't exist.

    I'm not saying you are an idiot, or that your general sentiments are completely off, but that one gave me a laugh.

    In the mean while there's an easy fix, as far as the incorrect search results go that are being discussed in the article. Just start using Duckduckgo and the issue is circumvented. Using Duckduckgo immediately also solves the privacy issues: they don't log anything about you.

    As others oft remind people, DDG gets many of its search results from Bing and other providers. So they are hardly invulnerably independent of similar influence. One would hope that as DDG gets more hits and funding that they will outgrow their dependence on external search engines for their results, and hold true to their stated ideals. I unfortunately remember how many of Google's initial ideals they ultimately compromised on, so my hopes for DDG are somewhat tempered. Also, just because DDG doesn't log anything about you doesn't mean that the NSA isn't. But yes, it is still a big improvement over Google's business model around monetizing those logs.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by monster on Thursday February 27 2014, @09:22AM

    by monster (1260) on Thursday February 27 2014, @09:22AM (#7859) Journal

    The real issue is not that they reorder results (as you say it's their job and the reason of their success), it's that they reorder them not to better serve the user who is searching but because of some spurious interests, be them their corporate agenda or someone else's.