Let's assume you're interested in a movie, and look it up on Google -- nothing new there. Picking a title at random, you might search for "The Illusionist", and the results are pretty good. The official site comes top, followed by IMDB, with Rotten Tomatoes and Wikipedia in the top 10 hits. (It's not such a good result if you actually wanted something about the worlds of David Blaine or Derren Brown.)
But let's assume you were interested in a porn movie. Someone suggested trying "Pigtail Cuties 5", so I did. This time, the top hits are torrentreactor, torrentz.com, and torrentspy, and there are a couple of Russian sites (which I didn't visit) that could be offering ripped versions.
So if you're searching for porn, Google provides great links for pirates. You don't really want to pay for it, do you? Or visit the company site, or read a review, if there are any.
Now go back to "The Illusionist" and click around the 46 pages of Google links. See any torrents? I don't. See any warez or other free download sites? Nope.
Perhaps I've been unlucky and missed them. Or perhaps Google has censored them, without mentioning it.
Or perhaps they don't exist? Don't be silly. Just search for "The Illusionist" torrent and Google clearly knows about the pirate versions. The top hits are isohunt, torrentz, btmon and meganova. I'm not a torrent user myself, but according to TorrentFreak, two of these are among the 600 most visited sites on the net.
This has been a five-minute ramble based on two titles, not on any in-depth research. However, it certainly raises the question: is Google really suppressing results from some of the net's most popular sites when you search for a "proper" movie, but not when you search for an improper one?
Does "Don't be evil" really mean it's bad to steal movies from rich and powerful Hollywood studios but it's perfectly OK to pirate porn?
Update: As usual, there is a logical explanation for all this, but it has made me revise and update my view of the way Google works. PageRank (based on links) clearly isn't what it used to be; TrustRank (which sites are trusted) is now more important than it used to be.
A big movie, such as The Illusionist, gets lots of links from trusted sites, so links to things like torrents get buried. Since Google doesn't actually show many sites (apart from telling you there are a gazillion hits) you can't necessarily see them, but poke around Yahoo pages 50 to 100 and some torrents are indeed there.
With a porn movie, however, there don't seem to be many (if any) links from highly-rated sites -- no reviews in The New York Times etc -- so random bozos linking to popular torrent sites lifts these towards the top.
Whether Google and its clones are actively suppressing torrent sites -- which is what I wondered -- is unproven and possibly unknowable. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch commented in an email:
Chances are, the various torrent sites don't carry a lot of authority weight with any of the major search engines. That could be on purpose, and if so, that's understandable. If they make those sites more visible, then they'll come under attacks to start pulling stuff out of the index. Don't give them authority, and the sites don't rank well, and you don't come under a lot of attack from copyright owners that want to use the DMCA guidelines to get stuff removed.
I certainly wouldn't criticise Google or anyone else for that. As with SafeSearch, you can find what you want if you look for it, but it (generally) isn't thrust in your face if you don't.
There's plenty more to read on TrustRank which, according to Wikipedia, "is a technique proposed by Zoltán Gyöngyi and Hector Garcia-Molina of Stanford University and Jan Pedersen of Yahoo! to semi-automatically separate useful webpages from spam."
Not everybody is entirely happy about the results. For example, Internet marketing consultant Todd Mailcoat protests that The Trust Knob is WAY too High: "Please Google... turn the knob back before you make the problems even worse."
So to the guy who sent me a link to a search for Pigtail Cuties 5, it did turn out to be an educational experience, if not in the way I first thought ;-)
