Disney Patents a Piracy Free Search Engine

torrentfreak.com

5 points·schrofer··5 comments

> Disney believes that current search engines are using the wrong approach as they rely on a website’s “popularity.”

Translation: Disney doesn't like that web site popularity is determined by people and not corporations.

> For example, a manipulated page for unauthorized sales of drugs, movies, etc. might be able to obtain a high popularity rating, but what the typical user will want to see is a more authentic page,” they explain.

Translation: Disney wants to determine what your moral values should be.

> such as results referencing piracy websites, child pornography websites, and/or the like,

Translation: searching for illegal Disney movies is commensurate with child porn. Don't every forget that when you think about illegal movies.

If this method worked (which I doubt, but let's assume it did), hackers could probly simply build a very effective search engine for pirated content simply by reverting the authenticity metric.

No, it doesn't try to suppress pirated contents as such, it tries to boost quality sites like those of Disney and its brethren. Reverting would bring all kinds of things to the top, good and bad, not just TPB.

To me it looks like the original pagerank plus a large dose of wishful thinking, and if it were implemented disney.com would rank 0.01 until manually boosted (in an act of "editorial judgment").

Why would they patent it? Do they not want other companies to use their magical invention?

They want to force other companies use their magical invention by law and then rip them off because they have to use their patent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com