Google strips Pirate Bay homepage from search results

Mountain View executes DMCA takedown

By Kelly Fiveash • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 2nd October 2009 11:36 GMT

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The Pirate Bay’s homepage and seven other pages relating to the BitTorrent tracker website have been removed from Google’s search engine, following a DMCA complaint.

Anyone attempting to locate thepiratebay.org via Google will be greeted with some results to access the website, but none that point directly at its homepage.

We’ve asked Google if it could tell us more about removing some of the site’s pages from its search engine, but at the time of writing it hadn’t got back to us with comment.

The Pirate Bay mouthpiece, Peter Sunde - who actually quit his position as the website’s main spokesman a few months back - asked on his Twitter account this morning “why is 'thepiratebay.org' (the frontpage) removed from your [Google’s] index?”

A DMCA notice at the bottom of a “thepiratebay.org” search query via Google reveals that Mountain View has simply reacted to a takedown request.

“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 8 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org,” reads a notice.

Interestingly, Microsoft’s Bing returns the correct result on its search engine, so it’s clearly not been slapped with a similar DMCA notice yet.

We'll update this story if Google offers us any further insight. Its policy on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is here. ®

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