February 21, 2013
Six Months Later – A Report Card on Google’s Demotion of Pirate Sites
“Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.” – Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President of Engineering, Google, August 10, 2012
Executive Summary:
On August 10, 2012, Google announced that it would take into account in its search result rankings the number of valid copyright removal notices it has received for a given site.(1) Per its announcement, “sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower” in its search results. The result of the change should be to “help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily.” Six months later, we have found no evidence that Google’s policy has had a demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy. These sites consistently appear at the top of Google’s search results for popular songs or artists.
Specifically:
• Over the six-month period, Google received notices for tens of millions of copyright removal requests concerning various sites, including multiple repeat notices of infringement of the same content on the same site;
• The sites we analyzed, all of which were serial infringers per Google’s Copyright Transparency Report, were not demoted in any significant way in the search results and still managed to appear on page 1 of the search results over 98% of the time in the searches conducted;
• In fact, these sites consistently showed up in 3 to 5 of the top 10 search results;
• This is of particular concern as studies have shown that approximately 94% of users do not go beyond page 1 results;
• For 88% of our searches for mp3s and downloads of popular tracks, Google’s “auto-complete” function suggested appending to the searches certain terms which are associated with sites for which it has received multiple notices of infringement, thus leading to illegal content;
• Well-known, authorized download sites, such as iTunes, Amazon and eMusic, only appeared in the top ten results for a little more than half of the searches. This means that a site for which Google has received thousands of copyright removal requests was almost 8 times more likely to show up in a search result than an authorized music download site. In other words, whatever Google has done to its search algorithms to change the ranking of infringing sites, it doesn’t appear to be working.
(1) “An update to our Search Algorithms,” posted by Amit Singh on August 10, 2012, available at http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/08/an-update-to-our-search-algorithms.html.
