‘BitTorrent’ Removed From Google Piracy Search Filter

Over the years we have seen many different steps being taken to help reduce piracy and Google have been central to much of it since it all began, which makes sense given their the biggest search provider and when people pirate files, they need to search for them.

The words BitTorrent and uTorrent were removed from Google’s autocomplete service in a bid to reduce people finding them and in effect damaging the site (financially) by reducing its traffic. Yet it looks like Google has unbanned these words, causing a sharp spike in search traffic for the words.

Google hasn’t removed sites like isoHunt or The Pirate Bay from their index, but they do not use the terms for autocomplete, which has caused a massive reduction for search requests of those sites. Google users searching for terms like “The Pirate Bay”, “RapidShare” and “isoHunt” will notice that no suggestions or search results appear before they type in the full word. While no webpages are removed from Google’s index, there is sharp decrease in searches for these terms.

But BitTorrent Inc. didn’t take their “pirate” branding lightly, continuously emphasizing that BitTorrent does not equal piracy. BitTorrent may have started life in the shadows for many and it is still prolific for illegal downloads, but there is certainly a lot more to the technology and the service that people can benefit from.

“This is almost certainly a result of that improving understanding helped by products like BitTorrent Bundle and BitTorrent Sync. They help those who are confused about BitTorrent understand that it is not a piracy website,” a BitTorrent Inc. spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

Thank you TorrentFreak for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of TorrentFreak.