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Digital
Google extends search term black list to include file-sharing sites
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 28 November 2011
Google has expanded the list of words banned from search recommendations so that it includes many of the leading file-sharing websites, Torrentfreak noted last week.
Responding to concerns expressed by rights owners, earlier this year the web giant introduced a black list of piracy-related words that would not appear in search recommendations. This doesn’t stop users from searching for those terms, but it means the search engine won’t suggest them as it auto-completes entries made by users.
Content owners complained that, for example, when you typed an artist’s name into Google it often used to suggest searches like ‘Artist Name BitTorrent’, which would almost certainly link the user to unlicensed content by that artist.
The initial black list was seemingly quite short, but has been quietly extended, possibly at the content industry’s request, possibly on Google’s own initiative. According to Torrentfreak, recent additions to the black list include “thepiratebay”, “the pirate bay”, “isohunt” and “torrentreactor”.
It is known that one of the issues brought up when Google was recently in licensing talks with Sony Music, for the new Google Music service, was a concern at the music major that the web firm’s previous commitments to reducing the presence of piracy websites on the Google search platform had not gone as far as many content owners had originally hoped. However, it’s not known if that kind of pressure has had any influence on Google extending its search term blacklist.
