from Hacker News

Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results citing Dutch court order

by XiS on 12/2/21, 6:57 AM with 316 comments

  • by watermelon0 on 12/2/21, 7:56 AM

    Regardless of your opinion on piracy, I think Google (and ISPs) should not moderate search results.

    Basically, search engines are used to find things publicly available on the internet, policing should be done on the actual hosts of the content.

    Same goes for ISPs, they are here to provide access to publicly available computers, without interfering with the content or accessibility.

  • by jug on 12/2/21, 2:22 PM

    Google already acts upon DMCA requests, delisting sites if requested. They add a small note to the end of their results to inform you if the page should normally have had more search hits.

    So this raises so many questions. Has _no party_ requested to delist TPB under DMCA?!

    That sounds incredible if true. But the only explanation I have for Google feeling like they need to go this far, delisting on their own initiative! It's like a scenario that should never have to happen, and something they should never do either.

    So what's going on here?

    Update: Ugh, editorialization... Apparently court has been involved here and while Google may not be individually targetted and forced YET, so "voluntary", it's easy to see how Google see the writing on the wall and choose to comply. No point in fighting this with such a clear cut DMCA violation. But in this case I'm still surprised it took this long!

  • by concinds on 12/2/21, 10:40 AM

    Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget Chrome.

    Google willingly interferes, in a heavy-handed way, with both search suggestions and search results, with both Google Search and YouTube. Just try to look up any topic on YouTube, and you'll have to get past the hundreds of mainstream media channels covering the event, before you actually find the original video. They artificially promote "authoritative sources" which are anything but, since they may be second-hand coverage of original videos that get buried in search results.

    Google's results are not only manipulated by clever SEO people[0], but by employees[1], in direct contradiction to Sundar Pichai's sworn testimony. Some of that is very defendable. But there's zero transparency. Given their search monopoly, and that most people aren't aware that search results are manipulated, Google Search is the web. Websites that get delisted are presumed to have ceased to exist. Focusing on browsers (Firefox) is good, but no longer enough.

    That's why Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Switch to other engines. DuckDuckGo, Brave Search are the ones I trust, and there's tons more.

    [0]: how many times have you tried looking for a machine's user manual, mistyped the model number, and somehow "found" a webpage with the manual for a product that didn't exist? and then modified the model number further and found more results from the same website, with relevant keywords and yet another incorrect model number? My understanding of SEO isn't good enough to know how they do that. I don't believe websites can dynamically alter their index to show up for so many typoed search queries.

    [1]: https://medium.com/@mikewacker/googles-manual-interventions-...

  • by GordonS on 12/2/21, 6:54 PM

    Around a year ago Google also delisted bluelight.org, which is a well-known site for recreational drug users - and it's focused on harm reduction

    It will still show results if you explicitly use `site:bluelight.org`, otherwise it never appears in search results - prior to Google delisted it, it always ranked very highly (top 5).

    I can't help but wonder about the harm that decision had made - people may well have literally died because of it.

  • by qwerty456127 on 12/2/21, 8:28 AM

    Is there a list of the sites Google de-listed somewhere? I'm pretty sure (in fact I knew some, but I can't remember) it included some interesting and totally legal websites.

  • by new_guy on 12/2/21, 7:13 AM

    Now if they'd only do the same with actual spam sites, see also related-ish discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29403947

  • by arepublicadoceu on 12/2/21, 4:21 PM

    Google has been on this crusade against piracy for awhile now. I first noticed when I tried to do this query a few months, years(?) ago:

    site:[famous non western tracker].com [insert music here]

    zero results.

    Same query, on duckduckgo: Everything there.

    Another query:

    [famous ebook sharing sites] on google.

    Non-related results

    Same query on duckduckgo: First hit is the correct website.

  • by k8sToGo on 12/2/21, 1:13 PM

    This they delist, but all the garbage spam sites they do not delist "voluntarily"?

  • by mountainb on 12/2/21, 11:32 AM

    I think the standard that I want to see service providers is "force me to do it, or I'm not going to do it." Get a court order. Get a warrant. Kick down my door. Sue me. Subpoena me. Stop rolling over without even getting a treat for it; it's pathetic.

  • by 3pt14159 on 12/2/21, 2:41 PM

    People will freak out about this, but I'm not worried. Search has this whack-a-mole find-the-pointer-to-the-pointer problem where unless you're going to up the state control at China levels it's essentially pointless.

    If you can't find the torrent site, you Google enough to find a community that will link to it. If you can't, you ask on Twitter. Etc. Etc. It's never going to stop someone determined. Credible threats of jail-time may, but these minor changes by Google and others aren't going to change anything important.

  • by lexapro on 12/2/21, 3:23 PM

    Google itself is a torrent search engine. Just google

      <anything> filetype:torrent
    So when is Google going to delist Google?

  • by KoftaBob on 12/2/21, 2:14 PM

    On a somewhat related note: are there good options in terms of P2P/distributed torrent search engines, which would make it so that websites like the Pirate Bay don't even need to exist? Instead, that distributed index of torrents could be searched directly from the torrent clients.

  • by gerash on 12/2/21, 11:17 PM

    There are so many armchair activists here who say this company should do this and that and ignore a local law.

    I wonder if they'd say the same if they were the ones who would be fined/prisoned for breaking those laws.

    The fix is to change the law, not asking companies to break them

  • by derekpankaew on 12/6/21, 6:18 AM

    The headline is a bit misleading. Google's only removing Pirate Bay from Netherland results, not global results, due to a local court order. That makes a lot of sense - Google complies with local laws in many countries.

  • by tiepoul on 12/2/21, 2:14 PM

    Is there any existing decentralized search engine? I do believe that Google should not interfere with the listing. Even if it's piracy, it should not take any people's freedom to discover different information catered for the people.

  • by DrBazza on 12/2/21, 12:47 PM

    I can think of other terms that Google should de-list that are far more harmful to society than a hooky copy of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.

    Google is a private company can do what they want, but this is still a pretty poor decision.

  • by squarefoot on 12/2/21, 12:23 PM

    To me the ideal alternative should be something that aggregates results from major search engines, like DDG already does with Bing and Startpage with Google, but applied to a lot more search engines, then takes the results returned from all of them and builds the results page uniq'ing them so that if link A appears in 3 search engines and link B in 1 and link C in 6, the result will be 3 different links anyway. That way, if one link is censored from one search engine, it could still be present in the list in a similar rank for being returned anyway by other search engines.

  • by throwawaysea on 12/2/21, 7:25 PM

    Google de-listing websites reminds me of that episode of Black Mirror where everyone is wearing AR lenses and the person who just came out of prison or whatever is not visible to anyone else but is instead a red mosaic when seen through their lenses. He's effectively blacklisted in the physical world. Google (and other tech giants) have tremendous influence and power - as much or more than most governments. It is very dangerous that they act the way they act. We need to heavily regulate them or build public alternatives that are beholden to laws like the First Amendment.

  • by chmod775 on 12/2/21, 3:09 PM

    Looking at my internet history, I hardly even use Google Search anymore compared to before.

    Five years ago I would still google pretty much any error message or problem.

    Nowadays I typically go to directly to the project's GitHub and search through issues there, go directly to their documentation, or just browse the code from my editor and figure stuff out myself. I have like 15 tabs just corresponding to the stuff I'm working on right now. It is pathetic Google managed to become so awful they managed to undo a decade of conditioning.

    Crippling their search intentionally even more won't help.

  • by cardosof on 12/2/21, 3:59 PM

    Google is a media company. You can call it tech or adtech, it will never hide the fact that they want to get your eyeballs to look at the highest paying ad with the minimum effort. And they want to keep running this operation with the least amount of friction - the kind of comes when streaming companies are paying for search ads bidding with movie titles just to have their ads a few clicks away from an "unofficial" movie source.

  • by 2-718-281-828 on 12/2/21, 12:09 PM

    yandex.com for the win. thank me l8r.

  • by Bud on 12/2/21, 3:55 PM

    Why was the headline on this article re-written in an obviously biased way? Wasn't the original, factual headline good enough?

  • by LightG on 12/2/21, 9:45 AM

    That's totally going to have an impact.

  • by dvngnt_ on 12/2/21, 4:36 PM

    I use DDG for normal searches, but when I actually need to find something i'll use google.

    One example is i like chill hop radio. whenever i search on DDG might get results, but google will usually send me directly to their bandcamp page which the the ideal result

  • by rasengan on 12/2/21, 3:09 PM

    You could try https://private.sh which decouples the search allowing it to be end to end encrypted without anyone knowing both who you are and what you searched for.

  • by stjohnswarts on 12/2/21, 2:19 PM

    This is why using alternatives is important.

  • by pleb_nz on 12/2/21, 7:34 AM

    Sounds more like back scratching

  • by formvoltron on 12/2/21, 12:47 PM

    Oh noes! I'm going to have a hard time remembering thepiratebay10.org

  • by CyberShadow on 12/2/21, 8:41 AM

    Title is editorialized by submitter. Actual title: "Google Removes Pirate Bay Domains from Search Results Citing Dutch Court Order".

  • by phendrenad2 on 12/2/21, 7:57 AM

    in the Netherlands, following a court order

  • by roosgit on 12/2/21, 9:15 AM

    Now how can we get a court order against Pinterest?

  • by supperburg on 12/2/21, 10:31 AM

    Google search sucks, has demonstrated political bias through deliberate intervention and has become dominated by direct and indirect advertising. And now they are just removing shit.

  • by SirensOfTitan on 12/2/21, 3:49 PM

    Great, glad Google has its priorities straight. Nevermind the rampant fraud that exists on their search engine like fake locksmith scams that they've done absolutely nothing about for years.

  • by mschuster91 on 12/2/21, 10:29 AM

    I'm always amazed that there are still people actively using torrents, given that even for popular software like Windows LTSB/LTSC there are virtually no well-seeded torrents on TPB and the music market has been pretty much eliminated by Spotify.