Google Continues Censoring Piracy-Related Search Suggestions By Blocking Grooveshark

TorrentFreak reports Google has added another website to the piracy block list for their instant search suggestions. The site is named Grooveshark, which is a popular free music streaming service.

Google would not comment specifically about Grooveshark, but told TorrentFreak, “our algorithms prevent terms closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete.”

Back in January 2011, Google began filtering piracy related terms from their instant search suggestions. Google said then that they will “prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete.” Google has, over the time, blocked dozens, if not hundreds of piracy related terms from showing in the search suggestions – including popular piracy related websites.

Of course in this case, Google blocking Grooveshark is possibly their way of calling out Grooveshark as explicitly being a piracy website. Although, Google will not issue such a statement or confirm this on the record, outside of the clear fact that Grooveshark no longer shows up in Google’s autocomplete results.

Google has also promised more recently to penalize websites that repeatedly are proven to pirate content.

It is unclear if there were too many DMCA takedowns for Grooveshark or if Google has decided to add Grooveshark to the blacklist of search suggestions because of its possible association to the piracy industry.

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Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.