Google joined the anti-piracy battle en force at the end of last week with an update to its search algorithm that seeks out and punishes copyright-infringing websites. Under the new policy, sites will be bumped down the ranks in Google’s search results if they receive lots of “valid copyright removal notices.” If they’re known to have actually infringed a copyright, they’ll be removed from the results altogether. Google won’t say exactly how it keeps track of the violations, but you can probably assume that sites like the Pirate Bay are going to take a hit.This ought to be bad news for Google’s own video site, YouTube, where tons of copyrighted material is uploaded every day. But Google denies any special treatment — sort of. “We're treating YouTube like any other site in search rankings,” the company told Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land. “That said, we don't expect this change to demote results for popular user-generated content sites.” Wait a second. So YouTube’s ranking won’t suffer from copyright notices? This seems a little bit shady, but Google has lumped YouTube into the larger class of user-generated content sites so that it doesn’t totally look like it’s playing favorites. (That’s not to mention that “user-generated content” is the standard line of defense for the types of aggregator sites that are massive violators, as displayed in the Oatmeal/Funny Junk saga, but don’t receive as much legal heat because they steal images from individuals, rather than hosting pirated music and movies from company with big legal teams.)Playing favorites is sort of Google’s game, though. Or at least that’s what its rivals say. The search giant took heat a couple of years ago, when sites like Yelp and WebMD complained about how Google was making a habit of displaying results from its own services above links to competitors. If you search for pizza in New Haven, for instance, you’ll get three Google Local results with reviews from Google-owned Zagat and a Google Map as well as links to more Google resources at the top of the page, well before you see any links out to other sites. Google doesn’t seem to think this is a problem. “We built Google for users, not websites, and our goal is to give users answers,” a Google spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal in 2010. “Sometimes the most useful answer isn’t ‘10 blue links,’ but a map for an address query, or a series of images for a query like ‘pictures of Egyptian pyramids.’ We often provide these results in the form of ‘quick answers’ at the top of the page, because our users want a quick answer.”We won’t know how dramatically the new anti-piracy measures affect Google’s own sites until we see it in action for a while. After all, Google is being pretty secretive about how exactly it will work. Presumably, though, it will be a lot harder to hammer out a Google search to find a pirated version of that new Batman movie. You’ll just have to go to Bing for that.
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