Google promoting legal video services with piracy-related searches

Google promoting legal video services with piracy-related searches

It looks like Google is starting to cave to the pressure piled on by copyright holders to delivering search results that prioritise legal services over illegal ones. Torrentfreak reports that the search giant has actually started delivering links to legal services in a stand-alone box placed just above it normal search results when people are searching for illegal ways to download movies, including keywords like BitTorrent and DVDrip. 

The services being promoted include Netflix, Google Play and Hulu. According to the report this box appears when users specifically add a piracy-related term to the title of the movie or of the TV show, and also when they accompany a title with keywords like “watch”, “view” or “download”, which are not directly piracy-related but express the interest of a user in watching them. 

The new feature has been appearing in the UK and the US but at the time of writing I haven’t been able to replicate it myself using a variety of searches. Searching for “Breaking Bad torrent” or “Rise of the plane of the apes torrent” still brings up plenty of illegal resources and no direct links to legal services, so this could all be part of an intricate A/B test by Google. 

It would be great to see the company provide a similar service when it comes to music, listing the potential streaming services or download stores where a song can be downloaded. 

(Andrea Leonelli)