[HN Gopher] Google preemptively banned hundreds of millions of '...
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Google preemptively banned hundreds of millions of 'pirate' URLs
last year
Author : CoBE10
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-09-03 19:03 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| simbolit wrote:
| I sometimes wonder why computer-literate people still use Google
| Search. Basically for all search queries I can imagine,
| DuckDuckGo or Yandex consistently give much better results.
| simbolit wrote:
| Can the person who downvoted this tell me why? I want to learn.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| We're discouraged from discussing downvotes, but I have seen
| a lot of totally innocuous comments get greyed out lately.
| I'm suspicious that some are deliberately abusing the
| feature. I wouldn't worry about it.
| primax wrote:
| Because there are a large cohort of Googlers and Xooglers
| here who are resolutely in denial that their golden goose is
| not dying, and they insist it is in fact fine. Whereas nearly
| any knowledge worker using Google daily for the past decade
| can attest to it's rapid decline in quality.
| shmde wrote:
| Also add in Phind, ChatGPT.
| [deleted]
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I flip between DuckDuckGo and Google because sometimes Google
| actually does have the results that I'm looking for when I'm
| submitting normie queries.
| pzmarzly wrote:
| Off-topic but: Does anyone know of a way to support TorrentFreak
| other than disabling adblock? They run next to no ads, don't have
| a donation form or paid offering, and yet have been a major
| source of news in "Big Tech vs Piracy" battles.
| djbusby wrote:
| Does your adblocker let you set exceptions?
|
| I've got an FF profile with uBlock that's disabled on some
| sites like that.
| taspeotis wrote:
| Keep downloading torrents so they have news to write about!
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Unless you're looking for a VPN subscription, disabling adblock
| doesn't look to help them much.
|
| I guess you can always get in touch with them:
| https://torrentfreak.com/contact/
|
| > Advertising / Guest posts
|
| > All advertising inquiries are ignored. We don't accept guest
| posts or sponsored posts, period.
|
| I love them so much!
| atVelocet wrote:
| Is it possible to file a FOIA to get the domains and build a
| uncensored version?
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| You could scrape the lumen database if they were requested, but
| it sounds like they weren't.
|
| I guess the next best would be scraping google/yandex/bing and
| comping which domains never show up on google.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Is it possible to file a FOIA to get the domains and build a
| uncensored version?
|
| Google isn't a governmental agency.
| serf wrote:
| an easy fact to forget when thinking about their efforts to
| squelch/amplify propaganda at their own discretion, their
| funding and backers, and the lobbying that they do on behalf
| of themselves and others.
|
| they're just as close to governmental agency as is allowed
| without taking the blame.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Technically true! Alas & woefully!
|
| They are acting under the demands made by the republic. If
| there is a government mandate to override freedom of speech,
| imo, it should always be required to leave a paper trail.
| userbinator wrote:
| I wonder if this is also hitting things like right-to-repair; a
| lot of useful information like service manuals and schematics are
| almost certainly in the realm of piracy, and I've noticed they've
| become a lot harder to find recently.
| ddingus wrote:
| Same, and that is part of what drove me to use Yandex more.
| It's working great like others here have said.
| JWLong wrote:
| Early last month, I found myself turning to Yandex in a search
| for the out of print manual for a 1980s mobile radio. Google
| had nothing. Yandex had almost nothing. But it was enough to
| piece together an answer.
| armitron wrote:
| URLs that Google banned show up on Bing just fine. Another nail
| on the coffin.
| dataflow wrote:
| Title feels quite misleading. This doesn't seem to have been
| Google itself going out of its own way to ban URLs as the title
| suggests, but rather the copyright holders submitting the Google
| takedown form before the content was indexed, as opposed to
| afterward.
|
| > "Search accepts notices for web pages that are not even in our
| index at the time of submission. Nevertheless, we will
| proactively block such web pages from appearing in our Search
| results and will apply these notices to our demotion signal."
| rolph wrote:
| yes , the reading suggests pre-emptive disqualification of urls
| from the include allows. i have a hunch that if you somehow had
| access to that indexing blacklist, it would be all manner of
| unseemly things.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| it might be more than that.. here in the USA I typed "Serbia
| News" into youtube and got only Albanian and Slovak sites.. only
| two months ago, I did the same and I did get TV news in Serbia..
| I wanted to know more about the northern border expansion of
| course, from both sides.. and what I got instead is predictable
| and disappointing in a "free" press environment
|
| secondly, the only time I have ever gotten a suspicious pause in
| Google translate, was relating to this area in those languages..
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Anything involving Serbia is subject to serious trolling
| campaigns. Serbia and its borders have been the cause of
| multiple wars in the 90s, and they're the only real Russia-
| aligned nation in the Balkans so Putin is spending a shit ton
| of money on propaganda campaigns for his friend Aleksander
| Vucic.
|
| Personal guess, I think that Russia is also strongly
| responsible for the current bullshit going on in Bosnia where
| the Serbian minority is riled up beyond belief; I would _not_
| be surprised if that is the cause for the next war, and had
| Ukraine not beaten up the Russians so strongly I bet that the
| original plan was to violently break apart Bosnia after Kyiv
| had fallen and the Western nations were too busy to deal with
| Ukraine to open up yet another front.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| yeah but "trolling campaigns" is social media..
|
| why is it unreasonable to read a newspaper in any language?
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Internet censorship has stepped up big time, especially since
| 2016/2017.
| jWhick wrote:
| nothing new, I'm quite sure if you try to get to russian
| propaganda you would get to similar blockers.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| here we go back to the 17th century ?
| transcriptase wrote:
| Yandex is incredible for things that Google and Bing serves up
| useless spam for.
|
| If you search "watch $MOVIE free" on google you're going to get
| netflix, Hulu, prime, Disney etc as the first results regardless
| of whether those sites even have it in their library. The
| remaining links are SEO spam that also don't have it but pretend
| they do, because the sites that actually do have all been struck
| or filtered.
|
| Yandex on the other hand... the first result is generally exactly
| what you wanted in 720 or 1080 with no BS.
|
| I do miss when google had a little footer that said "click here
| to view URLs that were removed due to copyright takedown
| requests".
|
| Edit: And I do pay for all of those streaming services and more,
| but in Canada if a franchise has 5 movies it's not unheard of to
| have #1 on Netflix, #2 on Paramount, #3 on no service available
| here, and #4 and #5 on Disney or Crave. It's the same with
| seasons of TV series: exhausting.
| circuit10 wrote:
| Did they remove that footer? If so it must have been recent
| because I remember using it semi-recently
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| I just checked, it's still there.
| SoKamil wrote:
| My guess is that's the matter of whether infinite scrolling
| is enabled.
| whstl wrote:
| For me it shows up in-between "pages" when infinite
| scrolling is active.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Yandex is incredible for things that Google and Bing serves
| up useless spam for.
|
| And yet, they're Russian and have been accused of cooperating
| with the Kremlin in the past [1]. Personally, I would not visit
| _any_ Russian domain at the moment, simply because it is not
| too far fetched to assume that the Kremlin (or "freelance"
| Russian hackers) will place malware there.
|
| I agree Google and Bing are utter crap and have completely gone
| off the rails, but Yandex is just too much of a security risk.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex#News_and_media
| whstl wrote:
| For me, searching "Watch Oppenheimer Free" on Google returns
| mostly malware and fake media-purchase websites (that will
| probably try to steal my credit card), mixed with SEO spam
| about _" how and why it's not available on Netflix or Hulu...
| yet"_.
|
| To me that's significantly worse than showing no results.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That's what I just searched and was able to watch
| Oppenheimer. The point isn't that it's crummy, the point is
| that Google or Bing are not answering your query or are
| answering with junk.
| vasco wrote:
| I still get it:
|
| "In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have
| removed 3 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read
| more about the request at LumenDatabase.org. In response to a
| complaint that we received under the US Digital Millennium
| Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If
| you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the
| removal(s) at LumenDatabase.org."
|
| If you go to that service they'll require an email but you can
| use a discardable one and still be anonymous to get the
| original blocked URLs.
|
| I actually still use this for torrent searches sometimes, it
| just takes a few more clicks.
| trynumber9 wrote:
| And Yandex reverse image search isn't neutered for copyright
| reasons either. It almost seems like Google of yesteryear, but
| with far more Russian language results.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Yandex Translate is also much better for many languages,
| especially for eastern ones. And viewing words and their
| synonyms individually is a _huge_ godsend if you are looking at
| slang.
| revskill wrote:
| Google result is annoying, the same as all video contents there
| (interuppted intentionally by Ads).
|
| The whole Ads crap is broking my soul hard.
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(page generated 2023-09-03 23:00 UTC)