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"Google has quietly added The Pirate Bay to its blacklist of censored search phrases. The move isn't a complete block: the pages are still being indexed, and you can still access the world's most popular torrent tracker from the world's most popular search engine. That being said, both the Google Instant and Autocomplete search services no longer show The Pirate Bay's website domains (including thepiratebay.org, thepiratebay.com, and thepiratebay.se) as well as related searches to them.\r\n\r\nBack in January 2011, Google started censoring &amp;quot;piracy-related&amp;quot; searches such as &amp;quot;BitTorrent,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;uTorrent,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Megaupload,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Rapidshare,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mediafire&amp;quot; and even completely legitimate searches like &amp;quot;Ubuntu torrent.&amp;quot; To this day, if you start typing any of these terms into Google, you won't get the obvious suggestion and will have to type the full thing before hitting enter.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nAs you can see in the screenshot above, The Pirate Bay was recently added to Google's censorship list (likely late last month). TorrentFreak puts it succinctly: &amp;quot;By censoring parts of their search services, Google is sending out a strong signal that they are committed to combating online copyright infringement, and to a certain degree their efforts are effective.&amp;quot;\r\n\r\nPrevious actions like this one suggest we can expect the number of Google searches for &amp;quot;The Pirate Bay&amp;quot; to decrease dramatically. That being said, The Pirate Bay won't be affected much. The site has previously gone on record to say that Google doesn't drive much traffic to the site, and that any form of censorship, whether that be by governments or companies, purposeful or accidental, tends to usually increase the number of unique visitors.\r\n\r\nNevertheless, it's unfortunate that Google has decided to make this move. After all, The Pirate Bay includes many legitimate and useful torrents.\r\n\r\nWhen I contacted Google about this change, I was told the company is not commenting and thus I cannot be provided with a statement. The Google spokesperson did point me to its Autocomplete help page, specifically noting the &amp;quot;Why don't I see any predictions for a particular topic?&amp;quot; question. Out of the four possible reasons, here's the one that is probably most relevant:\r\n\r\n\r\nThe search term violates our autocomplete policies. We aim to provide you with relevant search queries, but we exclude a narrow class of search queries related to pornography, violence, hate speech, and copyright infringement.\r\n\r\n\r\nWhile the company won't say so explicitly, it looks like Google now considers The Pirate Bay to fall under the &amp;quot;copyright infringement&amp;quot; category.\r\n\r\nImage credit: stock.xchng"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/09/10/google-starts-censoring-the-pirate-bay-domains-google-instant-autocomplete/>