Copyright content holders who want to stop Internet pirates from distributing illegal movies, TV shows, music, games, and other content on the Internet have apparently just scored a major victory, Business Insider reports, as Google has pushed out a major search update that may prevent you from discovering pirated movies and TV shows before you even have the chance to download them.
FROM EARLIER: Shocker: Extensive new study says movie piracy isn’t that harmful to Hollywood
Google has changed its search algorithm to further make illegal download sites, such as Pirate Bay, Torrentz.eu, Isohunt and others virtually disappear from search. According to an early analysis by SearchMetrics, some sites have seen an up to 98% decrease in visibility on Google’s search results.
The “Pirate” algorithm dates back to August 2012, when it was introduced to prevent sites with copyright infringement complaints from ranking highly in search results. Google has apparently improved it to further remove pirated content results from search in response to recent criticism from News Corp CEO Robert Thomson that Google Search is “a platform for piracy.”
“Amongst the loser sites are sites that had links and/or content to movie, TV and music content. Sites like movie4k.to which lost 98% of SEO Visibility have typical loser keywords like ‘download free movies,’ ‘watch [movie name] online free,’ ‘online free movies,’ ‘movies download,’ ‘watch [movie name],’ ‘where can I watch [movie name] online’ etc,” SearchMetrics said.
A list with the top 30 most affected websites by Google’s Pirate is available at the source link — and there might be the only place you’ll find them, considering they may not pop up in Google Search anymore.
