Google preemptively banned hundreds of millions of 'pirate' URLs last year

[transcriptase]

Yandex is incredible for things that Google and Bing serves up useless spam for.

If you search “watch $MOVIE free” on google you’re going to get netflix, Hulu, prime, Disney etc as the first results regardless of whether those sites even have it in their library. The remaining links are SEO spam that also don’t have it but pretend they do, because the sites that actually do have all been struck or filtered.

Yandex on the other hand… the first result is generally exactly what you wanted in 720 or 1080 with no BS.

I do miss when google had a little footer that said “click here to view URLs that were removed due to copyright takedown requests”.

Edit: And I do pay for all of those streaming services and more, but in Canada if a franchise has 5 movies it’s not unheard of to have #1 on Netflix, #2 on Paramount, #3 on no service available here, and #4 and #5 on Disney or Crave. It’s the same with seasons of TV series: exhausting.

[whstl]

For me, searching "Watch Oppenheimer Free" on Google returns mostly malware and fake media-purchase websites (that will probably try to steal my credit card), mixed with SEO spam about "how and why it's not available on Netflix or Hulu... yet".

To me that's significantly worse than showing no results.

[trynumber9]

And Yandex reverse image search isn't neutered for copyright reasons either. It almost seems like Google of yesteryear, but with far more Russian language results.

[vasco]

I still get it:

"In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 3 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at LumenDatabase.org. In response to a complaint that we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at LumenDatabase.org."

If you go to that service they'll require an email but you can use a discardable one and still be anonymous to get the original blocked URLs.

I actually still use this for torrent searches sometimes, it just takes a few more clicks.

[Pannoniae]

Yandex Translate is also much better for many languages, especially for eastern ones. And viewing words and their synonyms individually is a huge godsend if you are looking at slang.

[siva7]

Yandex.ru seems to be the real deal, uncensored internet (except anything not politically compliant with russia) while yandex.com doesn’t give me that useful results for the movie query. Google.com feels so censored and crippled now.

[martindbp]

I know this is old news by now, but Google really is becoming useless. I wonder, are they even aware internally that this is happening or are they so lost in their "Google is awesome" bubble that they have no chance of fixing it in time?

[arthur_sav]

I hadn't even considered using Yandex. Tried switching from Google to Bing this year but results are not much better - half of Google's results are either ads or irrelevant "safe" results.

[circuit10]

Did they remove that footer? If so it must have been recent because I remember using it semi-recently

[pjc50]

People spill a lot of characters on here about political censorship while ignoring that the existing Internet "speech" control infrastructure overwhelmingly deals in (a) copyright infringement and (b) CSAM. Those get slapped down everywhere by almost everybody.

[renegade-otter]

That's ironic because Oppenheimer is banned in Russia.

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-barbie-oppenheimer-license-da...

[N3cr0ph4g1st]

How does it compare to searx.be?

[dataflow]

Title feels quite misleading. This doesn't seem to have been Google itself going out of its own way to ban URLs as the title suggests, but rather the copyright holders submitting the Google takedown form before the content was indexed, as opposed to afterward.

> “Search accepts notices for web pages that are not even in our index at the time of submission. Nevertheless, we will proactively block such web pages from appearing in our Search results and will apply these notices to our demotion signal."

[rolph]

yes , the reading suggests pre-emptive disqualification of urls from the include allows. i have a hunch that if you somehow had access to that indexing blacklist, it would be all manner of unseemly things.

[candiodari]

"A distinction without a difference"

[gerdesj]

“For over two decades, we have observed that unmet consumer demand is a key driver of piracy. If demand is unmet by legitimate supply, users will seek pirated content. That is why one of the best ways to combat piracy is to provide better, more convenient, and legitimate alternatives,” Google writes.

Children will be childed by Google. Define: "piracy". Now, who should enforce ... piracy.

Google is a search engine and some other stuff - they should never, ever be involved in enforcement, let alone unilaterally involved in it and allowed to trumpet the same.

Law enforcement does law enforcement and not Google. If I was a policeman I would be absolutely incensed at this overreach into my domain.

[bandergirl]

> Define: "piracy".

I think the definition is pretty clear in the DMCA, no need to play with words.

> they should never, ever be involved in enforcement

Sure, Google should keep linking to completely illegal content, correct? Scams, CP, drugs, all belongs to Google indexes, you say.

There are laws, pretty clear laws around the world. Some countries deem illegal simply linking to certain sites.

Pirates might hate the new Google, but don’t act like it’s not obvious that they should do this.

[simbolit]

I sometimes wonder why computer-literate people still use Google Search. Basically for all search queries I can imagine, DuckDuckGo or Yandex consistently give much better results.

[userbinator]

I wonder if this is also hitting things like right-to-repair; a lot of useful information like service manuals and schematics are almost certainly in the realm of piracy, and I've noticed they've become a lot harder to find recently.

[JWLong]

Early last month, I found myself turning to Yandex in a search for the out of print manual for a 1980s mobile radio. Google had nothing. Yandex had almost nothing. But it was enough to piece together an answer.

[ddingus]

Same, and that is part of what drove me to use Yandex more. It's working great like others here have said.

[pentagrama]

This bans hasn't nothing to do with pirate sites that have scams and deceptive design patterns? The last time I visited the pirate bay without ublock origin, I was bombarded with ads with scummy copy like "you won x" or "stream for free now", fake search results, adult ads, and deceptive invisible clickable areas on top of the UI that opened new tabs with suspicious full page ads.

I never followed those links but I'm sure that it will ended up on installing malware or asking for credit cards.

I will understand if the Google Search algorithm de-ranks or bans sites like that, many people totally will fall to this scams.

[arijun]

People in this thread have said the results on Google for those terms include more scams/malware. I have no idea if that’s the case.

[gscott]

And removes them from saved links

https://torrentfreak.com/google-removes-pirate-sites-from-us...

[hedora]

Interestingly, this implies the people sending notices to google have a fresher index than google does.

Is the pirate bay still a thing, or is there some new competitor? (It’s possible the copyright holders are running their own crawlers, but that seems unlikely and also easy to block)

[tryauuum]

and this is my recent struggle with google search: https://bigmemes99.funnyjunk.com/pictures/I+hate+google+so+m...

[AraceliHarker]

YouTube and other Google-operated services should do their best to crack down on piracy, such as the uploading of television programs. It's ridiculous that they only show off their "justice" that no one asks for on sites that they can't monetize.

[paul7986]

I'm sure it helps some but pirate sites are all about word of mouth / sharing with friends

[greyface-]

This is a betrayal of Google's mission statement, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". It can be credibly argued that the DMCA requires Google to do this for allegedly-infringing indexed URLs. Nothing requires them to do this for unindexed URLs.

[atVelocet]

Is it possible to file a FOIA to get the domains and build a uncensored version?

[keiferwiseman]

Trying to corner the market with Google Drive

[revskill]

Google result is annoying, the same as all video contents there (interuppted intentionally by Ads).

The whole Ads crap is broking my soul hard.

[armitron]

URLs that Google banned show up on Bing just fine. Another nail on the coffin.

[pzmarzly]

Off-topic but: Does anyone know of a way to support TorrentFreak other than disabling adblock? They run next to no ads, don't have a donation form or paid offering, and yet have been a major source of news in "Big Tech vs Piracy" battles.

[Scoundreller]

Unless you're looking for a VPN subscription, disabling adblock doesn't look to help them much.

I guess you can always get in touch with them and ask: https://torrentfreak.com/contact/

> Advertising / Guest posts

> All advertising inquiries are ignored. We don’t accept guest posts or sponsored posts, period.

I love them so much!

[taspeotis]

Keep downloading torrents so they have news to write about!

[djbusby]

Does your adblocker let you set exceptions?

I've got an FF profile with uBlock that's disabled on some sites like that.

[crsv]

I have a hard time disabling ad block on sites of this ilk due to their tendency to inject malware into their JS to prey on the unsavvy. I don’t trust that if I enable JS I won get hit with an aggressive malware / zeroday.

[mistrial9]

it might be more than that.. here in the USA I typed "Serbia News" into youtube and got only Albanian and Slovak sites.. only two months ago, I did the same and I did get TV news in Serbia.. I wanted to know more about the northern border expansion of course, from both sides.. and what I got instead is predictable and disappointing in a "free" press environment

secondly, the only time I have ever gotten a suspicious pause in Google translate, was relating to this area in those languages..

[Scoundreller]

I'm still miffed that when I search for "coronavirus" into Google, I seem to get hand-picked results about covid-19, which is just one of hundreds of coronaviruses.

The wikipedia entry (which is often first for most search results about generic topics) is on page 2 and still likes to their covid-19 entry, not the one on coronavirus genus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus

[pjc50]

Hmm. Despite knowing what to look for it was a couple of goes before I could get a query to return https://www.rts.rs/sr/index.html - I had to ask for "RTS serbia".

(I am one of the handful of people watching Pesma Za Evrovisiju every year despite not understanding Serbian. One day AI will be good enough to give me subtitles)

[Synaesthesia]

Internet censorship has stepped up big time, especially since 2016/2017.

[mschuster91]

Anything involving Serbia is subject to serious trolling campaigns. Serbia and its borders have been the cause of multiple wars in the 90s, and they're the only real Russia-aligned nation in the Balkans so Putin is spending a shit ton of money on propaganda campaigns for his friend Aleksander Vucic.

Personal guess, I think that Russia is also strongly responsible for the current bullshit going on in Bosnia where the Serbian minority is riled up beyond belief; I would not be surprised if that is the cause for the next war, and had Ukraine not beaten up the Russians so strongly I bet that the original plan was to violently break apart Bosnia after Kyiv had fallen and the Western nations were too busy to deal with Ukraine to open up yet another front.

[jWhick]

nothing new, I'm quite sure if you try to get to russian propaganda you would get to similar blockers.