Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by jacekm » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 8:40 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #206

jacekm wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

55$ is still quite a lot of money in majority of the world. Plus some content is not available in some regions. I pay for Spotify but for movies (anime in particular) I still need to resort to torrents sometimes. I'd much more prefer to simply pay and avoid the hassle if only I had such opportunity.

Of course you have to cater to the local market realities. Doesn’t Chrunchyroll cater to anime fans? If you have to resort to piracy because their is no legal alternative but you would pay for one if it existed, it kind of proves my point.

Yes I agree with you. I've actually had Crunchyroll in mind when writing my post - many titles are not licensed for my country.

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

#222

Post by nasredin » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 9:01 PM UTC

josefresco wrote: post #69

atacama wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gmail has been easy for me. Do you absolutely need the (nice I admit) web ui? I thought I did until I completely switch to using mails clients (mail on macOS and iPhone). I don't miss gmail at all! I realise how long it took to check my email before. I'm using Mailbox.org btw. Cheap, lots of aliases, exchange server etc ... I switched 10 months ago and I don't regret.

I use GMail for the stability, longevity and ubiquitous access.

Until they lock your account even if you know the password...

Some people are OK with giving their PII like phone numbers to them, then Google is a good choice for them.

For me, it is not. Their schizophrenic registration system that SOMETIMES demands your phone number was the last straw.

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

#223

Post by kodablah » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 9:08 PM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #192

stcredzero wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google keeps on demoting sites in search for doing certain things. In the past, this has largely been good. This stance against piracy and the stance that YouTube has taken against the principles of free speech mark a trajectory I find disturbing.

Going from “their stance against piracy” to “socially engineer everyone for better using their power” is quite a leap and strikes me as overly dramatic / FUD.

It was very clear that one was about what a contingent in the company believes and another is about what the company does. It strikes me as quite the leap and overly dramatic to compare specific quotes about different things just because they're in the same thread.

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

#224

Post by tiatia123 » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 9:18 PM UTC

GijsjanB wrote: post #207

tiatia123 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New URLS? After 4 months we have not recovered from this.

301s were not an option?

we did this 1 month later. No effect.

We did a general 301. Not a product specific 301. Mistake?

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

#225

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 9:26 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#226

Post by burnt-toast » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

iaml wrote: post #126

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…

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

I've noticed a steep drop in the quality of results I receive from Google without the extensive use of search operators. Especially for politicized topics, I feel like I'm constantly fighting the search engine for access to a more diverse and useful spread of results. This has become such an issue that I've moved over to searx.me (meta-search engine) for the majority of my searches. While there are some edge cases where I have to move over to google (mostly image search), I feel like the results I receive from it are broadly superior to the ones I'm receiving from Google alone.

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

#227

Post by digi_owl » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 9:28 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #167

stcredzero wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google would've fought back much more -- as it has in the past -- if it wouldn't have gotten into the "content business." That's really the main leverage studios have over Google right now: "either remove the stuff we tell you or you'll no longer get access to the content you want from us." I wouldn't be surprised to learn that MPAA's board seat on the W3C was sponsored by Google (and Netflix, maybe Microsoft, and a…

Yeah i thing a watershed was back when movies were added to the Android Marketplace (later renamed Google Play).

This coincided with Android getting a much more restrictive permission regarding removable media (under the label media storage permissions), that made it impossible for non-system apps to write to removable storage (sd cards, usb sticks, etc).

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

#228

Post by Kiro » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 9:58 PM UTC

hjek wrote: post #209

Kiro wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for taking the time to look that up. So their bot is only for instant answers, and DDG is really just a metasearch engine? I'm a bit disappointed by that. Might as well change to Searx then. It's also "just" a metasearch engine, but at least it's fully free/libre. I wonder if there are any well-established free search engines that do their own crawling?

I understand it though. Quoted from the old Sources page on DuckDuckGo where they elaborated a bit on more:

> Bing and Google each spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year crawling and indexing the deep Web. It costs so much that even big companies like Yahoo and Ask are giving up general crawling and indexing. Therefore, it seems silly to compete on crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam, real privacy and a better overall search experience.

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

#229

Post by hartator » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 10:11 PM UTC

tiatia123 wrote: post #224

GijsjanB wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

301s were not an option?

we did this 1 month later. No effect. We did a general 301. Not a product specific 301. Mistake?

301 redirects by page for sure 1:1.

Plus, How is this linked to shopping carts?

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

#230

Post by Naga » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 10:18 PM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #152

chongli wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget pirate sites, Google is doing this for everything. I'm shocked at how often a search for some generic word or animal name brings up some company I've never heard of, with the Wikipedia page for that generic word buried at the bottom of the first page (sometimes pushed to the second page).

Really glad i switched to DDG for my random searches (i can always do a !g if i feel that the results are meaningless).

I switched to DDG permanently because of their other bangs. I am a baseball fan and regularly use FanGraphs to look at stats. If I google a baseball player, FanGraphs isn't even on the front page. Instead, I have news articles about him, tweets from him, and a bunch of other sites. With DDG, I can simply go "!fg jose bautista" and get exactly what I want. It really has saved me a lot of time and effort. Same thing with !w for wikipedia.