Filesharing site thePirateBay is being excluded from Google’s instant search in compliance to RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) request. Among the sites being removed from the autocomplete function are RapidShare and Megaupload which host copyrighted content. The sites are however still indexed by Google. In July of this year, a French court made a ruling instructing Google to remove the word “torrent” from their autocomplete function. Many such requests are forwarded to Google by different parties with the company receiving 1.2 million requests on average by May this year. So far Google has complied with 97% of the requests.
In its search algorithm, the company applies a small set of removal policies on objectional content. This includes violence, pornography, hate speech and illegally hosted copyright content. So far RIAA has been imploring search engines to block results leading to filesharing sites.
ThePirateBay says 10% of its traffic comes from search engines and the latest events will only lead to the growth of their traffic. Users will now go directly to the site when searching for content instead of using search engines.
