Google Search Lists Popular Piracy Sites Under Streaming Services

Nowadays its hard to imagine a life without Google. The company has one of the best search engines online and they’re always working hard to make their algorithms for finding information very accurate. Their search results are almost always highly relevant.

Lately a lot of torrent sites have been popping up on Google search. When you search for online streaming sites, many of these sites like RARBG, The Pirate Bay and 1337x, show up in the results along with their logos.

Intentional or Unintentional?

For quite some time, Google has been putting in efforts to discourage the use of pirated sites. However, they have not been very successful.

Apparently, there is a glitch in their algorithm. TorrentFreak looked into the matter and found out that Google’s search results are showing websites that feature pirated content, such as Putlocker, along with the genuine ones like Crackle or Hulu when people searched for ‘’streaming sites’’.

The results were seen in Google US’s domain primarily:

So whats happening here?

The results that are generated by Google Search rely on its algorithms. It is not practically possible to check all the results as they are automated. This proves that showing these sites in the search results is completely unintentional on Google’s part. Nonetheless,  this does not help Google’s relationship with the movies and songs industries.

These results are generated algorithmically, but in this particular case, do not reflect what we had in mind for this feature, and we are looking into it. – Google spokesperson

These industries have been reproachful of Google for years. According to them, Google is to be blamed for putting in a little effort to enforce their piracy policies. They want Google to completely ban pirated sites from search results instead of only downplaying them.

Google has been in the middle of a lot of controversies this year. Earlier in the year they were condemned over their placement of advertisements that featured offensive content, on their video hosting site, YouTube.

Via Engadget