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Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results

torrentfreak.com

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Re: Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results

#81

Post by Kiro »

hjek wrote: post #27
Kiro wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thanks. I might just as well use Bing then since that's where DDG get its search results.

Do you have a source for that? DDG has their own cralwer[1], so it would appear it also gets its own search results, even if may get some search results from other search engines. [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.

So DuckDuckBot is not used for any normal indexing. All actual search results are from Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.

Re: Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results

#82

Post by dcbadacd »

terminalcommand wrote: post #47
icebraining wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.tribler.org/ , which is developed by a not-for-profit research group supported by EU and Dutch research funding, does distributed torrent search without any central server. It's been around for almost a decade now.

Thanks a lot for the heads up. This seems to be exactly the thing I was dreaming of. If anyone is interested https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki link contains more information. I'm surprised I didn't hear of this project before.

It's not like the "Big Media" wants you to know about it.

Re: Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results

#83

Post by jnurmine »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #6
kragen wrote: post #5

I often find that Google sends me to scam sites like Elsevier instead of Library Genesis or TPB when what I am searching for can be found there. Is there a better search engine out there that solves this problem?

Make DuckDuckGo your default search engine now. Just do it. You won't miss Google.

There is also qwant.com which is in Europe.

Somewhat strangely, when I use Qwant, I often get better results than Google. This is of course anecdotical evidence and I do not use Qwant all the time (creature of habit, and so on).

Re: Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results

#86

Post by benhardy »

novaRom wrote: post #60

On any new device I normally do the same thing each time: 1) Install Firefox Nightly 2) Install uBlock Origin add-on 3) Enable Duck Duck Go as default search engine 4) Enjoy I am still looking for a good replacement for Gmail.

FastMail is pretty excellent, particularly if you like running mail off your own domains with Gmail-style wildcard address support and really fancy DNS. You get what you pay for.

Re: Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results

#87

Post by nolemurs »

Rjevski wrote: post #19
AngryData wrote: post #7

Google has been trash for pirate content for awhile now. 9/10 sites it does show are fake and straight up malicious with like 50 different things trying to hijack your browser and make you install shit. Not that real pirate sites are exactly safe, but at least they actually provide what people are looking for.

I wish that if they’re gonna downrank “good” pirate content then they should do the same (or worse) for the bad/malicious ones. Whether you’re pro or anti piracy, replacing that content with malware & scams does not make the world a better place.

> I wish that if they’re gonna downrank “good” pirate content then they should do the same (or worse) for the bad/malicious ones.

I'm pretty confident they'd like to but it's a tricky problem. Based on this article, they're downranking based on number of legit DMCA requests - the good sites will generate a lot of signal on that front. The bad/malicious sites won't.

The malicious/scam sites usually come and go quickly, so it's hard to learn which ones they are - if you figure out one site is a scam, and a new one pops up.

A real solution would require being able to make an automatic judgement about whether a site is bad/malicious based on the content of the site, but that's really hard, and it's really bad when you get false positives, so you have to be super conservative about it.

Re: Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results

#88

Post by auslander »

novaRom wrote: post #60

On any new device I normally do the same thing each time: 1) Install Firefox Nightly 2) Install uBlock Origin add-on 3) Enable Duck Duck Go as default search engine 4) Enjoy I am still looking for a good replacement for Gmail.

1) Safari, preferences - check 'open with new private window' 3) Enable Bing as default search engine

iCloud email

Re: Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results

#89

Post by GW150914 »

nolemurs wrote: post #87
Rjevski wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish that if they’re gonna downrank “good” pirate content then they should do the same (or worse) for the bad/malicious ones. Whether you’re pro or anti piracy, replacing that content with malware & scams does not make the world a better place.

> I wish that if they’re gonna downrank “good” pirate content then they should do the same (or worse) for the bad/malicious ones. I'm pretty confident they'd like to but it's a tricky problem. Based on this article, they're downranking based on number of legit DMCA requests - the good sites will generate a lot of signal on that front. The bad/malicious sites won't. The malicious/scam sites usually come and go quickly…

A real solution would be to employ competent humans rather than build and rely on incompetent algorithms.

Re: Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results

#90

Post by nolemurs »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #35
AngryData wrote: post #7

Google has been trash for pirate content for awhile now. 9/10 sites it does show are fake and straight up malicious with like 50 different things trying to hijack your browser and make you install shit. Not that real pirate sites are exactly safe, but at least they actually provide what people are looking for.

I run all such queries in a dedicated Linux VM so that I visit any "strange" websites only in that VM. I use a browser not connected to my (sync) account and don't login to any of my usual websites. uBlock Origin with all kinds of lists enabled is on, uMatrix is installed but it was too much of a hassle so it remains disabled. I hope my feeling of relative safety is justified, but I'm not a security expert(?). PS: Be…

> I hope my feeling of relative safety is justified, but I'm not a security expert(?).

If you want to be properly paranoid, you should consider getting a VPN. If you're not hiding your IP address, hiding all the rest is of limited utility. A VM doesn't really provide much meaningful anonymity - if someone wants to prosecute you for piracy they'll start by finding the IP address that was downloading/sharing the stuff (that's publicly visible).

On the other hand, it's pretty likely that this sort of paranoia is totally unnecessary - piracy prosecution against individual downloaders has been historically a PR nightmare for the groups doing it, and more or less everyone seems to have given up on that particular approach.

Still, if you want to be paranoid, a VPN will do a lot more for you than a VM and some add blocking.

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