Google appears to have begun implementing some anti- piracy in its search engine, following the constant pressure it receives from the entertainment industry to eliminate pirated results.
According to TorrentFreak, "The Pirate Bay", one of the most popular torrent sites in the world, appears to have been downranked by Google.
This does not of course affect users who download movies or music by searching directly from the site, but it does have an impact on users' searches with specific keywords through the Google search engine.
For example, Google will normally display the site when a user searches for the keyword “The Pirate Bay”, but it will not display the website in the first results when a user searches for a DVD rip for a specific movie.
While this is not proof that The Pirate Bay has been downranked, the fact that no link to the site appears among the first results raises questions, considering the popularity and traffic of the page, as well as how many downloads are made daily.
On the other hand, this only seems to affect Google.com, while the rest of Google's domains remain unaffected.
The tech giant may be testing its ranking algorithm to influence The Pirate Bay's visibility, but users prefer to use the built-in search boxes on torrent sites and search for pirated content rather than Google's search engine.
