Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More

[DLow]

It?s taken a while, but Google has finally caved in to pressure from the entertainment industries including the MPAA and RIAA. The search engine now actively censors terms including BitTorrent, torrent, utorrent, RapidShare and Megaupload from its instant and autocomplete services. The reactions from affected companies and services are not mild, with BitTorrent Inc., RapidShare and Vodo all speaking out against this act of commercial censorship.

The entertainment industries? quest to root out piracy on the Internet has yet again resulted in commercial censorship. A few weeks ago Google announced that it would start filtering ?piracy related? terms from its ?Autocomplete? and ?Instant? services and today they quietly rolled out this questionable feature.

Without a public notice Google has compiled a seemingly arbitrary list of keywords for which auto-complete is no longer available. Although the impact of this decision does not currently affect full search results, it does send out a strong signal that Google is willing to censor its services proactively, and to an extent that is far greater than many expected.

Among the list of forbidden keywords are ?uTorrent?, a hugely popular piece of entirely legal software and ?BitTorrent?, a filetransfer protocol and the name of San Fransisco based company BitTorrent Inc. As of today, these keywords will no longer be suggested by Google when you type in the first letter, nor will they show up in Google Instant.

All combinations of the word ?torrent? are also completely banned. This means that ?Ubuntu torrent? will not be suggested as a user types in Ubuntu, and the same happens to every other combination ending in the word torrent. This of course includes the titles of popular films and music albums, which is the purpose of Google?s banlist.

TorrentFreak contacted BitTorrent Inc. for a reaction, and Simon Morris told TorrentFreak that he believes the scope of this filter is too broad.

?We respect Google?s right to determine algorithms to deliver appropriate search results to user requests. That being said, our company?s trademarked name is fairly unique, and we?re pretty confident that anyone typing the first six or seven letters deserves the same easy access to results as with any other company search,? Morris said.

?A quick search for ?BitTorrent? currently returns a variety of legitimate and useful links, including company information, our software, our open-source protocol, and more. What Google may not realize is that our technology is used for many purposes that provide significant value to the technology industry, companies, artists and consumers at large,? he added.


Source and full article on TorrentFreak.

DLow Reviewed by DLow on 27th Jan 2011. Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More It?s taken a while, but Google has finally caved in to pressure from the entertainment industries including the MPAA and RIAA. The search engine now actively censors terms including BitTorrent, torrent, utorrent, RapidShare and Megaupload from its instant and autocomplete services. The reactions from affected companies and services are not mild, with BitTorrent Inc., RapidShare and Vodo all speaking out against this act of commercial censorship. The entertainment industries? quest to Rating: 5

[l0calh0st]

Who cares. We will find each other don't worry Google.

[Mr Happy]

No l0calh0st this is quiet serious. Lots of people use these keywords as search terms. I know for example that this problem is probably as a result of this http://www.besthostingforums.com/showthread.php?t=65797

I do expect a lot of webmasters to experience a drop in their organic traffic. Other's who don't have these keywords targeted as much shouldn't find their traffic drop and the opposite may happen that they gain an increase due to the keyword targeted sites decreasing.

Also while they are removed from instant search and from autocomplete they still show in the results. I think this is just the start and their is the definite possibility that they will be filtered from the main results too.

Cool things to note are that Rapidshare and Megaupload are censored but Hotfile, Fileserve and other file hosts aren't. This will please a lot of uploaders here and further help in Rapidshare's decline while increasing Hotfile and Fileserve downloads and revenue for the uploaders.
How long that will last though is unclear as they could easily add Hotfile to the list of filtered words too.

[pi0tr3k]

This is indeed bad news
End of warez is around the corner, I'm sure of it

[Daniel]

I assume more direct traffic..

[mikeee]

Not end of warez but drop in organic traffic on these sites.
Time to change keywords

[Rick]

Warez isn't going anywhere but underground.

[infernohuman]

Well it's just a matter of time when they'll ban "warez" as a word so I guess every warez titled domain goes out too...
I dont get it, they are making bad music, borring movies, bugged software, pack that with some nice words and trailers so we think how awesome that is, and wants us to buy it without trying it first. And they want to close us down...

Seriously, how often did you watch some movie just because you saw that awesome trailer to find out at the middle of the movie it's totally rubbish?

...sure some1 got few cents for uploading movie/album/software/game, and they get millions

[s1na]

If they want to bring down warez, they have to censor "Download" !
warez isn't going anywhere.

[sloddl]

i can't see any changes for the keyword torrent or rapidshare... still showing results for both like before... where did you read this?