Google preemptively banned hundreds of millions of 'pirate' URLs last year
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
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.
To me that's significantly worse than showing no results.
You’d think some group of obsessives on some forum somewhere would be compiling a database.
And we all mocked Chick Tracts: https://www.chick.com/products/tract?stk=1054&ue=d
It's like something out of Monty Python
In the EU much of our malware and blogspam is hosted by the EU government itself. We are way ahead here lolol
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=watch%20oppenheimer%20...
https://road-safety-charter.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files...
Edit: this is the same domain that hosts documents on the latest laws for cybersecurity (Radio Equipment Directive, Cyber Resilience Act, ...). And the same body that airs strong opinions on client side scanning. The same org that wants to be in charge of a EU wide database of vulnerabilities so it can tell you if your patch management process is too slow. ENISA were informed about these problems over 8 months ago. Meanwhile they are publicly ridiculed on social media for not fixing it.
Who's benefiting from these weird PDF uploads? Is it the copyright industry trying to make it impossible to pirate their movies? The PDFs don't even contain a link to the ad fraud site that's supposedly generating these.
But not willingly!
And yep, the bulk of Google results for me are those. Half those, half stupid blogspam, half fake-legitimate websites claiming to be legit sellers of media.
"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.
It’s been a few years since last time I saw it though. But that could also be because my searches now are different than they used to be.
Google Lens and whatever Bing calls their equivalent almost never find what I'm looking for. They barely function as a reverse image search anymore, and that's a real shame.
Youtube looks like very long infomercials.
Finding truth and not 'recommendations' is difficult.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-barbie-oppenheimer-license-da...
Also much of the existing speech control infrastructure is used to censor what people can see or say outside of copyright and CSAM (see China, Iran, Myanmar, UAE, Belarus, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Uzbekistan, ...)
> “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."
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.
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.
When I search for UK law stuff, it comes up on top. Your DMCA seems to hide itself somewhat.
I'm not a fan!
The canonical location to find the DMCA is the United States legislation, specifically the Statues at Large. On the other hand, the best place to find the DMCA online would probably be https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/PLAW-105publ304 , which offers downloads in multiple formats. This is also linked from the Wikipedia article that was offered before.
Always check the "External Links" and "References" sections of a Wikipedia article if you're looking for canonical sources like this!
Self-correction: I meant the "Statutes at Large". (I'd edit, but HN doesn't let you edit comments after a certain amount of time, and I only just noticed this mistake.)
Corporations think the definition is applicable to anything under the DMCA. They play with words all the time.
> Sure, Google should keep linking to completely illegal content, correct? Scams, CP, drugs, all belongs to Google indexes, you say.
Sure, Google should keep taking down content on behalf of corporations, correct? SymPy docs [1], EFF tweets [2], product reviews [3], political speech [4], films of police [5], all targets for enforcement, you say.
There are abuses, pretty blatant abuses of DMCA in every corner of the internet. Most monopolistic platforms don't even get an actual human being involved to resolve issues.
Corporations might love the DMCA, but don't act like criticisms against it are unfounded.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31087175
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19663229
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5409525
I don’t think that blocking torrent downloads of movies is in any way interpretable. It’s illegal. Period. The rest can be debated, I’m not talking about that.
> on behalf of corporations
Who said that? I’m talking about illegal content. It’s on behalf of the government.
The items you mentions fall into the gray area. CP and pirated movies are not in the gray area, they are not debatable. The decision has been taken and confirmed in the court of law and Google has to follow it. It’s as black and white as can be.
You can't do proper enforcement without interpreting. That's logically impossible. When it comes to interpreting, Google and others have a terrible track record.
> > on behalf of corporations
> Who said that?
That's what is happening right now under the current legal framework of big platforms being the judge, jury, and executioner. The legal framework you seem to support.
> The items you mentions fall into the gray area.
It's not gray. The things I mentioned, they should never have happened at all.
I really don't get where it comes from, it's just a company - not a religion!
Google results seem perfectly fine to me, and I know they have metrics that track how well it performs. And it's their golden goose, so it doesn't make any business sense that they wouldn't maintain its quality.
The "religion" seems, to me, to be people who keep insisting its results are getting worse. And I don't get it, because I just don't see it at all in my own experience. As far as I can tell, it's just anti-Google bias or something.
This thread has someone else asking for actual examples of where Google gives bad results and other search engines are great. And once again, nobody seems to be able to provide any. If Google really were declining, you'd think people would have put together objective evidence around it, because it'd be a heck of a news story.
There others where the results are all SEO content marketing spam.
The thing it rarely seems capable of doing now is showing legitimate non-spam content from smaller websites.
It also used to be possible when you were looking for a specific web page you've already seen, to type in a bunch of terms that you know are on that page and then it comes right up because it's the one page with all of those terms together. That doesn't seem to work anymore.
You'd think google could run it's classic algorithm to show it hasn't changed...
I personally didn't reply to that other poster, simply because their tone suggested (to me) that they were more looking for an argument than a civil debate. Yours is very different, and thank you for that. This is something I'd genuinely like to bottom out, because from my perspective there's been a noticeable, ongoing decline in the quality of search results from Google.
So, challenge accepted. Here's an example for you, and it's not even that subjective: Run a Google search that includes a minus term and tell me how effective the search results are in regards to obeying that instruction. That was a feature I used on a daily basis until Google made it completely non-functional.
If you want an example that doesn't rely on specific features, trying searching for "<thing you might want to buy> review". Enjoy the avalanche of low-quality SEO and link spam you're about to receive.
Also consider the fact that many searches you perform on Google are already offered with a "reddit" suffix, because so many people can only find the information they're looking for by appending that term to their search. Google by itself just cannot find what you want any more.
If that's not enough for you and you want specific examples, that's certainly possible. I was searching for a solution to a programming related problem on Google just a few days ago, and came up empty-handed after 20+ frustrating minutes of it including "related" search terms that weren't relevant. Reconstructing that search wouldn't be terribly difficult, if there were an indication the effort was worthwhile. In the end I went to ChatGPT and got my answer, including a fully-functional example, in less than 30 seconds. An experience that is becoming more and more the norm as time goes on.
> Run a Google search that includes a minus term and tell me how effective the search results are in regards to obeying that instruction.
Sure. I search for the movie I watched last night -- "How the West Was Won" (without quotes) -- and nearly all of the results are for the 1962 movie, as it should be. I search for "How the West Was Won -1962" and all the results are for the 1977 TV series, plus a Led Zeppelin album. Works great -- I use the minus operator all the time.
> trying searching for "<thing you might want to buy> review". Enjoy the avalanche of low-quality SEO and link spam you're about to receive.
I just typed in "dehumidifier review" and the first three results are from Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, and Good Housekeeping. Down the page includes more trustworthy sources like Tom's Guide and The Spruce. This is exactly what I want the results to be. I trust those a lot more than some random blogger of YouTuber, for instance.
> Also consider the fact that many searches you perform on Google are already offered with a "reddit" suffix, because so many people can only find the information they're looking for by appending that term to their search
Which is fantastic for me. I'll often find really valuable opinions in a single Reddit thread that provide a different perspective from Wirecutter, for instance. This isn't a failure of Google -- it's a testament to Reddit's success. (Indeed, Wirecutter and Reddit are often the first two things I want to read when researching a product -- but Reddit is more of a second pass.)
> I was searching for a solution to a programming related problem on Google just a few days ago
I definitely agree that finding incredibly specific solutions to technical problems can sometimes be hit-or-miss, but that's not a problem with Google at all, that's a problem with the entire concept of keyword search. But to my eyes, Google hasn't gotten worse over a couple of decades, it's gotten better. And I think it's noteworthy that your solution was ChatGPT, as opposed to a different search engine. That's exactly the kind of thing I turn to ChatGPT for as well. But again, I don't interpret it as Google having gotten worse, just as a new tool that's even better for certain types of tasks.
The nuance is difficult, but basically it's because you said "computer-literate". Your comment makes the suggestion that anyone who is computer-literate ought to be using Yandex/DDG, and if they are still using Google, then they are stupid.
A better comment would be "I've been using Yandex/DDG lately and the results are much better than Google!". That's just your experience or opinion - not judging other people or suggesting that they are stupid.
I wrote the comment initially without it, then thought about how many people don't even know there are alternative search engines, and added "computer-literate" to make clear I am not talking about normies, but people here on HN.
I can now see how my comment can be read as pretentious.
(not attacking you personally, just doing this for illustration)
k, thx for the downvotes :D
(Local ISP seems to know a lot of what folks look at even when using https and an encrypted bittorrent client.)
In general, while I was visiting Russia last year and the year before, Yandex Taxi (like Uber) impressed me quite a lot, too.
I think you’re right. I became computer illiterate by using Google.
Every time someone brings that up, I ask for an example of something they are looking for, and their search query, and every single time I either don't get an answer, or get an answer that shows Google has absolutely no problem at all.
So, give me an example.
Not in terms of filtering illegal content. That's a separate issue that has nothing to do with quality.
And what the heck are you talking about with center-left? You can search for literally anything on Fox News and Google will find it for you. There's no evidence whatsoever of Google results trying to show political bias.
Indeed, to the contrary -- isn't the whole criticism of YouTube is that is sends people down rabbit holes of right-wing and conspiracy recommendations? How do you explain that?
Au contraire, it's extremely common for measures designed to suppress illegal or disfavored content to have a high false positive rate and disappear from the results the very thing you're looking for even though it isn't illegal.
> isn't the whole criticism of YouTube is that is sends people down rabbit holes of right-wing and conspiracy recommendations? How do you explain that?
Google search and YouTube recommendations are different things entirely.
> You can search for literally anything on Fox News and Google will find it for you. There's no evidence whatsoever of Google results trying to show political bias.
It has a heavy mainstream bias. Fox News is right-leaning but it's the mainstream media. See if you can get it to organically surface anything from a libertarian or communist perspective, for example.
Just put in the search terms and it will give those things to you. It's not hard.
But obviously, for broad queries, Google is serving up the popular results most people click on. That's not Google's bias, that's just the bias of what most people are looking for. But you can find whatever you want with the right libertarian or communist search terms. Google's not hiding political viewpoints. Again, especially as evidenced by the fact that YouTube will start recommending that stuff to you if you like it.
Have you actually tried this? A search for "communist news" returns primarily pages about communism from major outlets like AP and CBS. Somewhat amusingly one of the results is the South China Morning Post, which is based out of Hong Kong and blocked in mainland China.
For "libertarian news" it at least gives Reason and Cato (which are fairly major outlets) but then proceeds with all the mainstream media outlets. No hint of anybody's blog or social media account anywhere.
> But obviously, for broad queries, Google is serving up the popular results most people click on. That's not Google's bias, that's just the bias of what most people are looking for.
It feels like the problem is that all the results are the same. Even if you search for some more specific subset of the news, all the results will just be the pages for that topic on each of the major media outlets who are all writing the same stories. Whereas better results might be e.g. the first three results are major media outlets but then it starts giving alternative outlets with varying perspectives.
Nobody is looking at the search results page and finding the coverage from CNN, BBC, MSNBC and CBS inadequate but finally finding satisfaction with NBC. These results are redundant with each other, or might be better served as an info box with a list of major outlets and a "more" button instead of constituting the entirety of the search results to the exclusion of anything else.
Essentially the problem is that it makes the search engine useless for discovery because the only things it will give you are the things everybody already knows about.
Trying this now. The second result is "People's World – Continuing the Daily Worker – Founded 1924", and the fourth is "Communist Party USA – cpusa.org".
Doesn't seem like Google's trying to censor anything authentically communist to me. But it is giving a wide range of results, from actually communist-written material, to mainstream news coverage of communism.
Seems to be working great.
These tend to be Russian misinformation websites promoted on Facebook and targeting unsuspecting gullible/old folk.
I've found Google search results to be poor these days but I don't keep a list of the searches that fail, so I don't have anything to share with you.
Oh they absolutely do, and thank goodness. What turns out to be the most useful page often contains a synonym instead, which an exact query would have missed.
But I've never seen Google return results that don't have anything to do with my search terms at all. Is that a problem you've had? Do you have an example query?
The only bad searches I get are when a word/term has multiple meanings and the more popular one crowds out what I'm actually looking for... but then I just add terms to narrow it down and it fixes it.
I don't take issue with spellcheck or even synonym suggestions, FWIW. It's that the results which include/are relevant to specifically requested terms appear below results that don't/aren't, sometimes way below. It hasn't always been this way but I can't pinpoint when results started getting worse.
If you put all terms in quotes, Google generally won't ignore anything. It will tell you it couldn't find any results though, quite frequently.
I don't care about having the right words in the right place if the results have what I'm searching for.
But again, no example provided.
Only ones in the first two pages (or more) are Biden's campaign website (of course) and Marianne Wilson's website. No RFK Jr, no Vivek Ramaswamy, not even Trump's.
Either it is egregious incompetence, or it's deliberate.
Yandex.com (page length 10) doesn't link to any candidate websites.
DDG (page lengths 10, 20, 50, 50, 50) links to Joe Biden (page 1), Nikki Haley (page 2), RFK Jr. (page 2), Chris Christie (page 3), Marianne Williamson (page 3), Ron DeSantis (page 3), and Perry Johnson (page 4). It's missing Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mike Pence.
Bing (page lengths 10, 14, 14, 14, 14) links to Joe Biden (page 1), Nikki Haley (page 2), Chris Christie (page 2), Marianne Williamson (page 3), RFK Jr. (page 3), and Ron DeSantis (page 3). It's missing Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mike Pence.
Brave Search (page length 19) links to Joe Biden (page 1), Marianne Williamson (page 1), and Cornel West (page 3). It's missing RFK Jr., as well as all Republican candidates.
Yahoo (page length 10) links to Nikki Haley (page 2), Chris Christie (page 2), RFK Jr. (page 4), and Ron DeSantis (page 4). It's missing Joe Biden, Marianne Williamson, Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mike Pence.
Google (page length 10) links to Joe Biden (page 1), Marianne Williamson (page 1), Ron DeSantis (page 4), and Mike Pence (page 5). It's missing RFK Jr., Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, and Chris Christie.
None of these search engines link to more than two candidate websites within the first 20 results, nor do they link to Trump's or Ramaswamy's websites, so Google is far from alone in that regard. (I haven't been able to test with Kagi Search to see if it is any different.)
Perhaps search engines are simply bound to see such a query as asking more for the concept of candidate websites in general, than for topical examples in particular.
Page 1: Biden, Williamson and link to an article Google hides campaign sites of Trump, RFK Jr. and other Republican candidates
Page 2: Biden again, Pence
No further pages. 5th result contains an article that claims to be linking all presidental candidate websites, but it's a Medium, hidden behind sign-up. I haven't find any result with a comprehensive list of the websites of interest. Kagi does aggregate results from Google and Yandex, so this is probably not too surprising.
First result: Joe Biden
Further down: Bernie Sanders, Marianne Williamsson, Hillary Clinton
Further down: Article: "Google hides campaign sites of Trump, RFK Jr. and other Republican candidates"
Further down: Ron DeSantis
Between these results there are several links with lists of all candidates.
I can definitelly see pages with lists of candidates, but I couldn't find a single one that would also link their websites and thus satisfy the query, at least indirectly.
Thanks for confirming that you are in the second bucket and just don't know how to use it.
hitachi mb-h2 data recorder repair
Expected result: pages from [my nickname].com.
If you use Google for that query you won't find much of anything. Using Yandex you find all sorts of articles and information. The topic is considered transphobic so it is blocked on Google.
It's been years since I last thought to look, but here's a list of current search engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines
Amazing to see Dogpile still around! Search feels like an oddly under-remarked-upon topic on HN because it's always within the context of a few big names (or else massively criticized by Googists - saw a lot of sneering responses to Neeva and Brave search...).
One thing I'll recommend to everyone: Just set your default search to anything but Google. It takes a few months but your brain, internal search result filter and your overall search behaviour adjust. Google is like an addictive drug in some sense.
I've started using Bing Chat for search queries thst only produce spam results and while Bing lies and misleads in its direct answers, the links it provides to support its statements are usually quite good.
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.
https://torrentfreak.com/google-removes-pirate-sites-from-us...
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)
Google isn't a governmental agency.
They are acting under the demands made by the republic. If there is a government mandate to override freedom of speech, imo, it should always be required to leave a paper trail.
they're just as close to governmental agency as is allowed without taking the blame.
I guess the next best would be scraping google/yandex/bing and comping which domains never show up on google.
The whole Ads crap is broking my soul hard.
I've got an FF profile with uBlock that's disabled on some sites like that.
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!
secondly, the only time I have ever gotten a suspicious pause in Google translate, was relating to this area in those languages..
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.
why is it unreasonable to read a newspaper in any language?
You should have a good look at the map.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11753050
(Undoubtedly Blunt is exaggerating the story, but Russian forces were definitely present.)
How exactly would Russia get to Bosnia?
The key thing is, if had Kyiv fallen, do you think that the Western nations would have had time and resources to care about the Dayton accords and intervene again? I seriously doubt it and I'm pretty certain the Serbians came to the same conclusion.
Thankfully though, Kyiv held up, and the Serbians were forced to cancel their plans since contrary to expectations the Western nations did manage to get a reasonably united response against the Russian aggression.
The problem remaining is that ethnical tensions still are high and there's not much effort being done to defuse them, partially because everyone's attention is on Ukraine at the moment.
the 'current' bullshit has been going on for decades though; there's no need for Russian involvement to make it flare up occasionally (e.g. in the run-up to general elections usually). my impression is it's just Serbia feeling empowered and opportunistically using (the global focus on) Russian invasion of Ukraine to further their goals in Bosnia.
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
The #2 result is the wiki for the complex.
(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)