Google is well on its way to becoming the copyright police for the internet. On Friday, the search engine company said that websites accused of copyright infringement will lose rankings in search results to the point that users may not have the time or patience to even search for them.
This may be a very bad idea for the company as its job is to provide its users with the most relevant search results based on keywords. It is not however Google's job to filter those search keywords as to what is legal or unlawful.
For example, if a person searches for "Microsoft Word 2013 Free Download" it is not Google's job to determine as to whether or not it is legal to provide a user with results that can possibly lose money for Microsoft's software.
"Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site," said Google SVP of engineering Amit Singhal in a blog post. "Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results."
There are plenty legitimate reasons to lower websites rankings. Google already commits to this by having a SafeSearch filtering option.
At this point, Google may fail to realize that if it does take part in demoting search results for a website based off of its unlawful, harmful, obscene, or plagiarized content, users of the internet will more than likely begin to create their own search engine indexes that serve their needs; basic rules, of supply and demand.
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