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Comment by elsewhen | Hacker News Reader

Won't this impact YouTube dramatically?

FTA:

> Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site.

Following the link, you get to this page of stats ( http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/... ) on take-down requests. If that page is what they make their basis on, then YouTube doesn't crack the top pages, so I would guess that it won't be hurt too badly.

Although, I have no idea if their count for YouTube is accurate or not. It's not like they wouldn't have an interest in under-reporting the numbers.

read the FAQ for the site (or the "Whats included" box on overview page).

"The data below consists of the copyright removal requests we've received through our web form for Google Search. It is a partial historical record that includes more than 95% of the copyright removal requests that we have received for Google Search since July 2011."

In other words youtube data is not included. This is only for websearch

That's the point. If they are going to rank links to youtube the same way as they link any other sites (as gp is using as the basis of the question), they would only use search takedown requests as the signal, not requests that youtube receives directly.

here is the detail page for youtube: https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright...

YouTube responds to DMCA requests so I assume copyright holders would contact them first, and not need to send notices to Google (search).

It's not about the site responding to DCMA requests, because how would Google know about this? This about how many DCMA requests Google gets to delist a search result I believe.

Right. What I think the parent comment is saying is that if they have contacted YouTube directly, Google (the search engine) would not get served with a take-down notice... YouTube would and it would have no influence on Google Rank.

For smaller sites, why would rights-holders bother trying to contact the site when they can just get it delisted from google?

I never mentioned smaller sites. Still, if you mean a smaller site operating like YouTube, contacting them directly would allow it to be taken off the internet rather than just out of Google results. Still, they might contact Google as well, and thus harm their rank.

Indeed. There's no incentive for rightsholders not to hedge their bets, and so even well-meaning user-generated content sites will suffer. Unless they're google properties, presumably.

There's some room for it to be a left hand vs right hand thing. That is, if the YouTube portion of Google is responsive to takedown notices, then the Google Search portion of Google isn't getting notices to remove those pages from the index.

It might "impact" YouTube's competitors even more dramatically.

If if YouTube does receive a high level of copyright notices, you can bet they have a special case for ranking YouTube videos, just because they own it.

So when I google an artist/song, someone's upload on youtube would not be in the first three results?

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