Google Begins Banishing Torrents From Their Index
This post was published 2 years 3 months ago and its content may not be valid anymore.Google, the search engine that garners all my ire, has long filtered their search results mostly without their users knowing but now they are filtering out torrents from their index based on DMCA complaints they receive (but at least now they TELL users).
So, apparently one day Google decided that it is illegal in nearly every country of the world to host a .torrent file that (allegedly) links to infringing material. Strange, because there is no legal precedent for this decision in most countries.
The owner of SumoTorrent told TorrentFreak that he discovered that A search on Google for sumotorrent now triggers the following message at the bottom of the results page:
“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.”
A search for other BitTorrent sites like Torrentspy and Torrentreactor comes up with the same message (note. the sites are still indexed but some results are removed). Strangely enough, for torrentreactor it only shows up for a search on the .com domain.
Is this the beginning of a very slippery slope? Does a website exist if it isn’t in Googles index?
Google™: It’s only evil if we say it is
booooooooooooooo
Google giving in to “the man”…. it’s a sad day :(
Whatever happened to free information for all, or whatever Google called it?
Yeah I still like google… I dunno guys, seems like they are only looking out for their wellbeing, which, if that means iGoogle, googledocs, gmail, and gcal get to stay, I’m fine. What’s teh big problem with Google anyways?
Funny, I type in ’sumotorrent’ and it comes up. No notice of any filtering or anything.
just a straight search of “torrents” doesn’t show any DMCA notice or filtering of any kind…
Yeah, even back when I was trying to find bittorrent software–and learn more about it–Google was useless. Have you noticed that Wikipedia entries come up last (how convenient, it begins with a “W”)? They are on the one hand crushing the rights of copyright holders, and on the other hand stroking the gob’ment.
It IS pretty handy in general, though!
It brings me to tears to see google doing this… I thought they were cool, I guess they are just players… playing with my heart!
Google hasn’t done it yet, I just found 5 torrents on google.
i don’t search for torrents on google anyways, so i’m fine with their decision.