Piracy Terms Removed from Google Search Suggestions Deemed Overly Broad

Google is facing strong criticism for removing search suggestions and instant results for terms like BitTorrent, uTorrent, RapidShare and others as part of its commitment to fighting piracy.

At the beginning of December, the Web search giant revealed via its general counsel that it plans on making improvements to the way it tackles copyright infringement issues.

Among several announced changes, the company said it will prevent terms "closely associated with piracy" from appearing in Autocomplete.

TorrentFreak now reports that Google has kept its promise, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired and can actually hurt legitimate businesses.

A little transparency like announcing when the restrictions came into force or the full list of excluded terms would have been nice, but even in its absence, one would expect from a company developing complex data processing and ranking algorithms to come up with a list of relevant piracy-related keywords.

As any kid could tell Google that people search for pirated movies by using a combination of name, quality indicator, popular rip team or favorite download site.

So let's take the critically acclaimed "Inception" movie as example and see how Google deals with searches for pirated copies.

Typing "Inception dv" in the search box is enough to return "Inception dvdrip" as a suggestion. Selecting it generates instant search results, the first of which is a torrent listing on thepiratebay.org.

In addition, typing the full "Inception dvdrip" returns "inception dvdrip xvid-arrow", "inception dvdrip hotfile", "inception dvdrip mediafire" and "inception dvdrip tpb."

ARROW is a well known release team, Hotfile and Mediafire are two file hosting sites and TBP is the short name for The Pirate Bay.

No one searches for pirated copies of Inception by using the search terms "Inception utorrent," but, for some reason, Google decided to remove the name of the popular bittorrent client from Autocomplete.

It did the same with RapidShare, a file hosting site similar to Hotfile and Mediafire, but since the former are not blocked, they now have a competitive advantage.

It will be interesting to see Google's explanation for these choices, if it ever decides to provide one. For now, there's complete silence on this matter coming from the company's Mountain View offices.