Google voluntarily plays copyright cop, punishes violators in search results
Google (GOOG) may not have liked the idea of being forced censor its web results but the company now seems happy to do so on its own terms. The company on Friday announced in its Inside Search blog that it had updated its algorithms to punish websites that were repeatedly flagged with legitimate copyright violations by lowering their rankings in search results.
Google says the goal of the update is to “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.” However, Google insisted that it would not all together remove alleged copyright violators from its search results entirely because “only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed.” The changes to the algorithms go into effect next week.
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