Pirate sites are increasingly hard to find in search engines. Google has taken a series of steps to demote or remove problematic domains and it doesn’t appear to be alone. Several of the most visited pirate sites have virtually no results in Bing either. According to the search engine, this isn’t the result of an ‘editorial decision’.

Over the past several months, we have repeatedly reported on Google’s decision to voluntarily remove pirate sites from its search results.

Google will do so if local court orders require ISPs to block access to the sites. These measures are geo-targeted at the applicable countries, which include the UK, France, and the Netherlands.

Thus far Google hasn’t publicly commented on its motivation but several rightsholders have confirmed the actions. Interestingly, however, Google is not the only search engine where pirate sites have gone ‘missing’. In fact, it’s quite a persistent problem on other search engines as well.

The rest of this article can be read on TorrentFreak.com

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