Google will begin rolling out a change to its search algorithm that the media giant says will "visibly affect" rankings of piracy sites globally.
The Mountain View, California company promised to do this in 2012. But at the time, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and others said the changes to its search algorithm had "no demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy." Google said the latest global algorithm changes, to roll out this week, will work.
“In August 2012 we first announced that we would downrank sites for which we received a large number of valid DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] notices,” Google’s senior copyright counsel Katherine Oyama wrote in a Friday blog post. “We’ve now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites."
The announcement of the algorithm update came as Google unveiled its latest "How Google Fights Piracy" report to show that it is trying to help combat online piracy. The company announced last week that Google-owned YouTube paid out $1 billion to copyright holders in a program that allows them to monetize unauthorized use of their copyrighted material uploaded to the video-sharing site.
Oyama said that the search engine was trying to steer Internet users to more legitimate sites. Among several methods was "removing more terms from auto-complete based on DMCA removal notices," she said.
Under the DMCA, Google must remove links to infringing sites from search results if requested to do so by rights holders. If the company doesn't, it could face legal liability.
The "How Google Fights Piracy" report said that Google received 224 million takedown requests last year; six hours was the average time to handle each request. "We ultimately removed 222M, which means we rejected or reinstated less than one percent after review because we either needed additional information, were unable to find the page, or concluded that the material was not infringing," the report said.
The top three sites where links were removed were RapidGator, 4Shared, and Dilandau. Each received more than seven million takedown requests.
Google noted, however, that it isn't about to make infringing websites disappear from search. "Even for the websites that have received the highest numbers of notices, the number of noticed pages is typically only a tiny fraction of the total number of pages on the site," the new report said. "It would be inappropriate to remove entire sites under these circumstances."
The biggest requester of takedowns last year was BPI, the UK music industry lobbying group. Geoff Taylor, the BPI chief executive, said he was "encouraged" by Google's new anti-piracy move.
"When fans search for music or films, they should get legal results—it’s as simple as that,” Taylor said in a statement. “If these new steps help guide more consumers to services like Spotify, Deezer, and iTunes, which give back to music, instead of to fraudulent torrent or hosting sites, then they would represent a step forward for artists, labels, and all those trying to build a thriving music economy online."