Google may have blasted The Pirate Bay with a hefty broadside by sinking it deep into its UK search results.
Research conducted by TorrentFreak found that searching for ‘The Pirate Bay‘ with Google’s UK search engine resulted in the piratebay.org site appearing five pages down into the search results, while in the us the same search term served the Pirate Bay site as the top ranking result.
Google has been under pressure to take action against sites that facilitate the spread of pirated content, so down ranking the position the The Pirate Bay in search results would be one such course of action.
However, Google told VentureBeat that it hasn’t taken any action against The Pirate Bay and that the reason for the unusual search results in the UK could be down to a range of reasons.
“Google hasn’t done anything to purposely demote The Pirate Bay for searches on its name in the named countries,” said a Google spokesperson.
“A site’s ranking on Google Search is determined using hundreds of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query, including things like the specific words that appear on websites, the freshness of content, your region, and PageRank.”
One such factor could be due to how often The Pirate Bay has been taken down, as Google’s search algorithm down ranks sites that have suffered from regular take-down action.
However, in our tests at the time if writing, searching for ‘The Pirate Bay’ using google.co.uk and a London-based IP address serves up results with the piratebay.org at the top of the first page. So it would appear the torrenting site is no longer being down ranked; whether that’s through action Google took or the website’s own admin, we cannot say for sure.
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Have you run into any trouble using searching for The Pirate Bay? Let us know on Twitter or Facebook.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
