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Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results

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

#211

Post by hakfoo »

scarface74 wrote: post #178

If content owners want to fight piracy, make content easier to get at a price people are willing to pay. There will always be a certain contingent of people that will never pay for content and will always choose piracy. I personally stopped pirating music when iTunes Music came online. It was much easier to pay $0.99 for a song than to scour Napster,Kazaa, Limewire, and the rest of the p2p software. Now with Apple Mu…

In the end, though, piracy can solve "easier" a lot faster than legitimate services, especially as you get more into niche content.

There's no way to build a legal "everything in one platform" service, just because of the logistics of trying to find rightsholders, and deal with ones who may be outright hostile (think of all the TV/movie firms who are desperate to bootstrap their own streaming services, rather than just being another section inside Netflix's catalog).

For a lot of services, we've seen "it doesn't have everything, but it has 90% of the most popular things" and that's been good enough. But is it really? I suspect a significant number of customers will gradually return to piracy-- at least as a supplement-- as the legit catalogs get exhausted and their tastes reach for more and more obscure stuff that's not available anywhere else.

I suspect the only real solution would be some sort of mandatory licensing-- let the platform owners scoop up everything and just submit a royalty to some escrow system based on how often it's consumed.

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

#213

Post by jankeymeulen »

njarboe wrote: post #191
dyeje wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's a secret, vanilla Google endpoint out there without all the special interest filtering.

I wonder if people working at Google get a different google search from the rest of us. Seems likely.

No, doesn't seem different to me. Of course, when logged in with the corp Google account / on the corp network you can see some debugging info and there will be likely some experiments running, but pretty much the same.

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

#214

Post by scarface74 »

hakfoo wrote: post #211
scarface74 wrote: post #178

If content owners want to fight piracy, make content easier to get at a price people are willing to pay. There will always be a certain contingent of people that will never pay for content and will always choose piracy. I personally stopped pirating music when iTunes Music came online. It was much easier to pay $0.99 for a song than to scour Napster,Kazaa, Limewire, and the rest of the p2p software. Now with Apple Mu…

In the end, though, piracy can solve "easier" a lot faster than legitimate services, especially as you get more into niche content. There's no way to build a legal "everything in one platform" service, just because of the logistics of trying to find rightsholders, and deal with ones who may be outright hostile (think of all the TV/movie firms who are desperate to bootstrap their own streaming services, rather than ju…

I don’t disagree. But the more obscure tastes are usually on the margins. You will never get rid of piracy but you could take a big bite out of it by making it easier and more affordable to get the 80% of content and just ignore the long tail.

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

#215

Post by menacingly »

stcredzero wrote: post #160
shiado wrote: post #124

I remember I used to do filetype searches for mp3, mp4, flac, etc... and get all sorts of good stuff. I would find ftp servers with thousands of songs and just download anything interesting. I feel like the Google search algorithm peaked many years ago and has gradually been neutered by all sorts of special interest groups who have no doubt harassed Google with legal threats. Google probably doesn't want to censor re…

Google probably doesn't want to censor results the way they have been forced to. From what I've seen, there is a large contingent of Google who doesn't want to provide unfettered access to information. Rather, this contingent wants to socially engineer everyone for the better using their power.

You can pick an arbitrary contentious political topic, or even a topic that borders a political topic, and get markedly different "leanings" from bing and google on the first page. One of them at least appears to be aiming at something with the results.

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

#216

Post by pessimizer »

Good start, now if they would just downrank sites that were trying to sell me things or were using identical copy, maybe if I search for subject X, I might be able to find websites with people discussing or explaining subject X.

Generally, when I search for a movie or a book on a search engine, I'm not trying to buy, pirate, or read the wikipedia article about it (or I would have just searched wikipedia.)

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

#219

Post by bobcostas55 »

clarry wrote: post #188
iaml wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be funny to see bing finally reach google search quality not because it got better, but because google got worse.

I just used Google Image search and in frustration switched to DDG because I have no idea how to get direct links to the images that Google presents. I don't think it was always this hard? Or maybe I've grown dumber. EDIT: Evidently you can right-click and view image. I thought that wouldn't get me to the original image since the image as presented in search is smaller in resolution than what Google says the image re…

There's a chrome extension that restores the view image button.

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

#220

Post by skybrian »

stcredzero wrote: post #160
shiado wrote: post #124

I remember I used to do filetype searches for mp3, mp4, flac, etc... and get all sorts of good stuff. I would find ftp servers with thousands of songs and just download anything interesting. I feel like the Google search algorithm peaked many years ago and has gradually been neutered by all sorts of special interest groups who have no doubt harassed Google with legal threats. Google probably doesn't want to censor re…

Google probably doesn't want to censor results the way they have been forced to. From what I've seen, there is a large contingent of Google who doesn't want to provide unfettered access to information. Rather, this contingent wants to socially engineer everyone for the better using their power.

It's unclear what "unfettered access" would mean for a search engine. Google has always been ranking results from the very beginning (PageRank). To get unbiased results you'd need a random sample of something, which is never going to be useful in a search engine.

So they are always going to make some people unhappy and the question is who. It used to be people nobody on Hacker News cared about like spammers and click farms (remember them)? But you could still call that censorship or social engineering even then. Isn't getting rid of spam also "using their power?"

Without heavy-duty ranking and spam prevention, would you even use it at all?

So yeah, they have a lot of power, they're getting leaned on by other powerful forces, and we don't need to agree with their choices. But just like a newspaper has to decide on something for its front page (and leave other stuff out), a search engine's gotta rank things.

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