“Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily – whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.” Wait, did I hear someone say the Google Play store needs content too? Joking aside, understandable move.
So, does this mean Youtube will go down substantially in their ranking?…
Will it by chance be weighted against the number of non-infringing pages on the same site?
YouTube uses the Content ID program to avoid DMCA takedown notices. This has recently been brought to public attention again through the blocking of the NASA Curiosity video.
Also I presume that the copyright removal notices that Google receives for their search are relevant, not those that YouTube receives.
So I presume that other video streaming sites which not cooperate with rights holders as well as YouTube will be punished more.
This is a great idea, providing they go to reasonable lengths to ensure a copyright infringement notice is “valid”. What constitutes a valid infringement? Can Viacom just bomb a site into the ground with a thousand well formatted (and thus legally valid) infringement notices, or do they need to be investigated and deemed valid and accurate?
Personally I’ve switched to using DuckDuckGo in as much as possible.
You know what would be nice? Instead of worrying about copyright infringing sites, how about they lower the rank of sites that have admitted to tampering with downloads, like cnet, or ones that the sites are outwardly unreadable due to the billion ads on it?
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some sort of ‘vote if this site is crappy and you didn’t actually find what you were searching for, but it had a white text on white background with a bunch of keywords (not that I’ve seen a site like that in a VERY long time).
I’ll second the vote idea. I’ve gotten so tired of SEO spam junk on Google i’m actually using Bing now and while i don’t care for the “did you know?” default page it is good for looking for reviews and hey! Free movie rentals for using it.
I just don’t see how this is gonna be in any way fair, after all we all know which site gets more takedowns than any other…YouTube. Anybody think they are gonna downrate their own site? I have to wonder if this is something the EU would get involved in as it does seem ripe for abuse. Any site owned by Google that gets takedowns gets ignored, everybody else gets buried.
This is why I miss the old days when all Google did was search, before all the other brands came along. As we’ve seen with the other big two, MSFT and Apple, its just too tempting to push your own products while hamstringing the other guy’s stuff.
I think I’ve actually seen an option to “hide content from this site” after going back from a particular result to the main result list in Google – can’t reproduce it now, though.
IIRC, Google forbids using “white-text-on-white” trick and you get unlisted from index if caught.
You seriously think that such “voting down” wouldn’t be ripe for even more abuse and ~SEO?
And anyway, a similar function certainly was available in Google searches for quite some time (~“don’t show to me this site in results any more”). Though I haven’t seen it recently …either it was already abused, or simply not used, and removed (it’s also telling that you apparently didn’t notice it)
So your saying people carrying NASA material will be hit hard? How do you know a take down notice is actually valid? Will you demote companies providing false notices?
I do agree with Google on this one, but what is next? Writing in APA Format. There are also legal ways of writing believe it or not!
Google basically created SEO it may end up being their undoing if they are not careful. Like I said I do agree with them on this one.
I feel old. I remember a time when you wanted to search something, you found it. You needed to read 3-4 pages worth of results, but you’d always find a lot of answers. Now … if it isn’t on the first page, then you need a better search query.
When does a Search Engine, cease to be a Search Engine?
A: When it’s Google Search.
I vaguely remember when Google could be used without several pages of irrelevance to wade through.
Considering the number of bogus DMCA and slap moves taking place, and how slow the big websites such as YouTube and others have been to deal with them, this looks like an ideal way to start getting non-corporate and non ‘placement paying’ websites out of the top Google rankings.
And what do they mean by “valid copyright removal notices?” Anybody can file one. A takedown notice is only an allegation. It doesn’t prove anything. It’s up to the courts to decide if a copyright violation has really occurred. So Google receiving a notice that was “validly” filed is no proof that what the notice is claiming is actually true.
Not that it will stop Google from acting as if it were. And too bad if the notice filed against you is completely bogus. Ever try to actually talk to somebody at Google? Or even worse, get something corrected?
Edited 2012-08-11 13:13 UTC
Guys, Google is apparently on the “block first, ask questions later” train copyright holders so much desire. Aka when something is considered by one supposed rights holder copyright infringement, it gets immediately blocked without any kind of due proccess, and it’s up to the uploader to prove himself innocent and rebuild lost mindshare.
The question is: Did Google became like this because of the massive harrasment by Viacom and Co, or because of their adventures in Google Play and VEVO?
Anyway, someone make a tool that abuses Content ID to bring YouTube to a halt, so we ‘ll at least get some lulz out of this.
Well, this is pretty understandable. I mean, when you’re getting thousands of takedown requests a day (as Google probably does) and most of them are probably legitimate anyway, you obviously wouldn’t have the resources to investigate each and every one of them. And since they’re legally obligated to respond to these requests, what other choice do they have?
I myself don’t really mind the change, since I have often times in the past had to append ‘-torrent -crack’ to my search queries when I was looking for info on a particular thing.