Grooveshark gets added to Google's piracy search filter

[Justin Kahn]

Google has been filtering piracy related sites from its instant and autocomplete search functionality for a couple years, and now the company has added popular music streaming service Grooveshark to the list of sites that will no longer appear automatically in Google search.

Grooveshark's streaming service offers its users more than 15 million songs for free across mobile devices, its site and through various streaming embeds. For the most part the company has been trying to keep the music industry happy by offering promotion options and analytics tools, but it certainly doesn't completely follow the guidelines set out by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The company has made deals with independent artists and labels but is still running into trouble with the majors.

At this time, it is unknown why exactly the music service has been removed, but it seems to have been somewhat related to the successful appeal by the Universal Music Group against Grooveshark two months ago. Google obviously factors in a number of different criteria when deciding what gets on this blacklist, one of which the company said are DMCA related takedown requests.

“We are removing terms from Autocomplete where we find that those terms are closely associated with infringing results,” a Google spokesperson told TorrentFreak. “When evaluating terms for inclusion, we examine several factors, including correlation between the term and results that have been subject to valid DMCA takedown notices."

This removal of certain sites from its instant and autocomplete search option has both a significant effect on traffic to these domains, as well as to users who may not have discovered them yet.

Although Grooveshark may not be running a completely DMCA standard accepted service and to some, deserved what they got, it still brings up the question of the amount of power Google has over deciding what makes a quality service and what makes an inappropriate one. It is pretty hard not to think of this decision to remove GrooveShark as one that is just taking the side of labels and not users.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/53356-grooveshark-gets-added-to-googles-piracy-search-filter.html

 

[soldier1969]

There are a dozen other sites to look it up, google is not tell all see all for your searches lol. Try startpage...Anonymous and it works.

 

[hahahanoobs]

So if you're a total doofus that can't spell, or you have the worst memory on the planet, then this works. If not, it's useless. At least Google stopped some car thieves, so that kinda makes up for it.

I get Grooveshakers (Band) when I type: Groovesha

 

[hahahanoobs]

There are a dozen other sites to look it up, google is not tell all see all for your searches lol. Try startpage...Anonymous and it works.

Fail.

Google produces the link to Grooveshark, if you type (or paste) the ENTIRE word.

 

[Trillionsin]

Can anyone list off some great search engines that dont filter out stuff that we might actually want or a way to turn off google's piracy filter?

I remember Google being the greatest search engine around.. anymore it seems like they keep on filtering stuff out, and this autocomplete bullshit is starting to get frustrating, it's not really helping me, at least....

 

[oldikes]

Google started becoming ***** proof and it starting tagging the intelligent people as *****s in the process.
Hence why google thinks it knows what im trying to type better than I am. I dont want google to mess with what I type in automatically! its annoying to say the least.

 

[oldikes]

Also, why does techspot tag the word that describes unintelligent people as a cuss word? it makes my post look alot more ignorant than it actually is, haha

 

[lawfer]

Also, why does techspot tag the word that describes unintelligent people as a cuss word? it makes my post look alot more ignorant than it actually is, haha

Because apparently, when justified, calling people what they are can hurt their "feelings"...

 

[nickblame]

Can anyone list off some great search engines that dont filter out stuff that we might actually want or a way to turn off google's piracy filter?

I dunno, maybe https://duckduckgo.com/ ?

 

[Guest]

Along with the bubble search filter, this makes google less and less useful for actual search, too much control, too much censoring, zero and I mean ZERO privacy

I moved to DuckDuckGo actually, it sometimes needs you to fine tune your search keywords a bit more but it gets the job done better than google

 

[Duckula22]

I'm dreaming of Web 3.0, absolutely decentralized, impossible to censor. At least for some aspects of one's web experience, like p2p communities. I have seen way too many bogus DMCA take down requests, that **** can't continue. A guy made a mod for Doom, and Mediafire was asked to have his stuff removed, probably because the word "doom" was somewhere in the package title. I managed to find the package on a german server, and I can assure you it infringes nothing.