14 DAY TRIAL // What happens when Google implements a new set of anti-piracy measures that rely, in part, on the DMCA requests received for various sites? Well, the company gets flooded with even more such demands than before, of course.
After Google’s new pirate search algorithm was implemented a few weeks back, the number of takedown notices sent by copyright holders has skyrocketed, TorrentFreak writes.
Popular torrent sites have already been hit quite hard by the move, although other, smaller ones, have risen in their stead. Half of their search engine traffic has been lost, although many big sites are not too concerned since their direct traffic is much larger than what they get from Google anyway. Even so, that means millions of visitors lost for every week.
As mentioned, DMCA notices play a central role to the anti-piracy algorithm that the company implemented just recently. While Google has never really complained about the avalanche of DMCA notices it was getting in recent months, this time around it can be blamed for its own misery.
It was only natural that copyright holders would figure out that sending even more of these demands would tilt the balance in their favor and pirate sites would sink even further. After all, the more DMCA notices a website gets, the less likely it is that it will score high up in the search results pages.
Number of DMCAs nearly doubles
Over the past week, the search engine has received enough DMCA requests to remove 11,668,660 allegedly infringing URLs. That’s nearly double the amount it received a few weeks back, and also the largest week-to-week increase in the company’s history.
It’s not just big pirates sites that are being targeted now, either, it’s also smaller ones; quite likely the very same that have taken the place of the likes of The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents. Last week’s top five targeted sites were conexaomp3.com, vmusice.net, tpbt.org, proxymirror.co and helpamillionpeople.com (who runs a Pirate Bay proxy through a subdomain).
While these sites have flown under the radar until now, for the most part, they’ve all had more than 300,000 URLs removed last week.
It’s quite likely that we’ll see a continuous attack on these sites via DMCA notices sent to Google and other search engines.
Google’s decision to update this particular algorithm came as a reaction to the complaints the music and movie industries kept having regarding the fact that the search engine wasn’t doing nearly enough to fight against piracy, although they’d much rather torrent sites simply disappear completely.
