Thanks to a DMCA complaint filed with Google, the company’s search index now doesn’t feature the Pirate Bay’s homepage anymore and the Pirate Bay’s PageRank has been dropped to zero. Now, when users search for ‘Pirate Bay,’ a link to the DMCA complaint and a notice that explains that a number of search results were removed from the page appears at the bottom of the page. Interestingly, though, the Pirate Bay hasn’t fully disappeared from the search results and a link to piratebay.org/browse still appears on the first page.
Update: According to Google, “the removal appears to be an internal error and not part of a DMCA request.”
According to Chilling Effects, a clearinghouse for DMCA takedown notices, the complaint was apparently sent by an adult entertainment company, Gwen Media’s Destined Enterprises, which has filed similar complaints with Google before. According to TorrentFreak, the complaint was sent by RemoveYourContent, a company that specializes in sending out DMCA complaints for the adult entertainment industry.
For the time being, the effect of this takedown notice is that PirateBay.com, a scam site that really shouldn’t appear in Google’s index, now sits at the top of the search results.
It’s important to note, though, that this is far from the first time that Google has deleted search results after receiving takedown notices. To the best of our knowledge, however, this is the first time a well-known site like the Pirate Bay has been affected by this.
