Google has updated its How Google Fights Piracy report with details of its latest moves to remove pirate sites from its search results. A key element is improved automated demotion of sites that have received high numbers of DMCA takedown notices.
In August 2012 we first announced that we would downrank sites for which we received a large number of valid DMCA notices. We’ve now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites. This update will roll out globally starting [this week].
The “most notorious sites” are likely to include rapidgator.net, filestube.com and dilandau.eu, each of which has, notes Gizmodo, received at least 11 million individual takedown requests …
Google is also working harder to ensure that such sites show up less often in searches suggested by autocomplete.
The company has for some time been promoting legitimate sources of music and movies in searches which appear to be looking for pirated content through highlighted results and the right-hand panel, and last year acted to cut off ad revenue from pirate sites.
You can read the full text of Google’a announcement below.
Today we’re publishing a refreshed How Google Fights Piracy report, which explains how we combat piracy across our services. This new version updates many of the numbers from the 2013 version and lists a few other developments in the past year:
- Ad formats. We’ve been testing new ad formats in search results on queries related to music and movies that help people find legitimate sources of media. For the relatively small number of queries for movies that include terms like “download,” “free,” or “watch,” we’ve begun to show the following:
We’re also testing other ways of pointing people to legitimate sources of music and movies, including in the right-hand panel on the results page:
These results show in the U.S. only, but we plan to continue investing in this area and plan to expand internationally.
- An improved DMCA demotion signal in Search. In August 2012 we first announced that we would downrank sites for which we received a large number of valid DMCA notices. We’ve now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites. This update will roll out globally starting next week.
- Removing more terms from autocomplete, based on DMCA removal notices. We’ve begun demoting autocomplete predictions that return results with many DMCA demoted sites.
Every day our partnership with the entertainment industry deepens. Just this month we launched a collaboration with Paramount Pictures to promote their upcoming film “Interstellar” with an interactive website. And Content ID (our system for rightsholders to easily identify and manage their content on YouTube) recently hit the milestone of enabling more than $1 billion in revenue to the content industry.
In addition to strengthening these relationships, we continue to invest in combating piracy across all our services.
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