Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More

torrentfreak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–88 of 88 posts

Re: Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More

#81

Post by epscylonb »

DanBC wrote: post #76
Confusion wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really want a citation for something that is obviously true? Of course in any censorship debate, there is someone that says "you can always get it through the underground, the black market, the fact that the ban isn't actively upheld, insert other similar reason". These folks are always around. Asking a citation to support that assertion is silly. Otherwise I ask you to cite support for your assertion that "a mat…

> Of course in any censorship debate, there is someone that says "you can always get it through the underground, the black market, the fact that the ban isn't actively upheld, insert other similar reason". What? In this discussion people said that Google is censoring information about torrents; but no-one has said "use a different search engine" because Google will return results about torrents, they just don't retur…

But interestingly it does appear to lead to less google searches being performed for those keywords.

As to the affect this has upon actual visits to the sites in question, only they can say.

Re: Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More

#82

Post by cousin_it »

ordinary wrote: post #65
bandushrew wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm? 'Rape' has auto suggestions. In general I dont think that consumption of child pornography is much of a crime, the harm has been done by then, and some poor sad git masturbating over a 3 year old isn't going to make it any worse. Personally I would rather they put significant resources into catching those people who create it, than into changing search engines and blocking dns addresses so that everyone can pret…

Demand encourages supply.

Your demand for censorship encourages supply of censorship, so I guess we should throw you in jail.

Re: Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More

#83

Post by VonLipwig »

The title is misleading. Google still indexes these sites and they still appear in the sites search results.

All Google is doing is saying they don't want sites like this to be found quicker or stumbled upon using search helpers like auto-complete. If they want to make it so you need to explicitly hunt down sites which make copyrighted material easily accessible to be download then what is the problem?

Re: Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More

#84

Post by [deleted] »

ernesto99 wrote: post #11
ars wrote: post #5

Extremely inaccurate title, torrentfreak should be ashamed. The results are "censored" only from autocomplete, not from the index itself.

TorrentFreak here... They do censor these words right? The title is correct but we can't always include all nuances. We hope most of our readers will take the time to at least read three sentences :) I considered " Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More From Their Autocomplete and Instant Services Until A User Types In The Complete Term" but that seemed a bit too much. But yeah, I'm very ashamed…

[deleted]

Re: Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More

#85

Post by JonnieCache »

Confusion wrote: post #64
bad_user wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I search for "torrent" on Google, the third result is The Pirate Bay, and when I search for "torren" The Pirate Bay is the first result, with a suggestion to correct the word to "torrent". Of course, as you may know, results are relative to the user profile Google builds about you. Throughout history, all episodes of censorship have been met with the response that the material isn't REALLY censored Citation need…

You really want a citation for something that is obviously true? Of course in any censorship debate, there is someone that says "you can always get it through the underground, the black market, the fact that the ban isn't actively upheld, insert other similar reason". These folks are always around. Asking a citation to support that assertion is silly. Otherwise I ask you to cite support for your assertion that "a mat…

>you can always get it through the underground, the black market

"Having to press enter after typing your query" doesn't really count as descending into the black market in my eyes.

When google starts actually blocking tpb from its results across the board, rest assured that I'll be right there next to you, molotov in hand.

Re: Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More

#86

Post by grecy »

billpatrianakos wrote: post #39
grecy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. To keep the discussion going, how would you feel if in the future, Google removed the "offending" sites from it's index entirely?

Do you mean offensive sites in general or just these file sharing sites? For torrent sites I think I'd be pissed. I'm no fan of piracy and I'm not an apologist for those sites at all but I don't think it's Google's place to do that. Google's mission is to index and organize the world's information and blacklisting websites like that would be hypocrisy. Even if we all agreed it was okay for one site it becomes a slipp…

It's interesting you point out it would be a "slippery slope" to be on.

It isn't a hard stretch to imagine in the future, you need to turn safeSearch off to see them in search results. Sometime further in the future you'll need to add some other preference or something to see them. Then, you'll need to be logged in and have a "verified" account. Then....

I think it's safe to say Google are well and truly on the slope of slipperiness.

Re: Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More

#87

Post by 1010101111001 »

1010101111001 wrote: post #33
paganel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand how it's related to this particular issue though. Because when it first started I think there was a mutual, non-spoken agreement between web content-owners and Google, sort of "I give you our content for free to use it on your search engine and you bring me back visitors by trying to be impartial in your SERPs; but I don't expect you to compete against me, not now, not ever". That didn't last lon…

If you want to build a search engine, there's no need to crawl the web. Just crawl Google. That's what Microsoft did. The inequities of crawling are in my opinion a huge issue with the web that receives relatively little discussion. If a majority of websites were to ban Googlebot, Google would be brought to its knees. Slowly. Their index would go stale. I like Google. But I do think crawling, who gets to do it and wh…

I'm guessing the reason this was downvoted was the first paragraph. It was meant as sarcasm. Bing fans on HN I did not expect.

Re: Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More

#88

Post by gldalmaso »

paganel wrote: post #28
JonnieCache wrote: post #23

I said this before last time around on this non-issue: Google are not preventing people reaching tpb results. They are declining to actively push these results unbidden upon people. The massive, fundamental difference between these two things should be obvious. Do we really think it's unreasonable for google to decline to actively point it's users towards largely illegal material which they had not explicitly request…

> They have every right to do whatever the hell they want, within law, to make their business as successful as possible. If you don't like it, go use DuckDuckGo, or start your own engine. There's a public domain page index available now, have at it. Google has built its business on other people's content, is that simple. But then it started to gradually "steal" more and more of said people work, until it became the g…

I think we are reaching a point in history where giant corporations are reaching a state-like status where corporate policy begins to have the weight of law in the sense of how many people are affected by it outside the company; corporate public relations and agenda becomes diplomacy with several different states, concerning different interests for the parties involved.

Not that these things weren't true when the corporations started, but as they scale, so does the influence and responsbaility.

It reminds me of the old Cyberpunk 2020 rpg book where corporations have they own law, police, etc.

Post reply on HN