Recent spike in search for keywords like ‘BitTorrent’ and ‘uTorrent’ indicate that Google may have removed these two terms from its piracy filter.
In a bid to reduce piracy and reduce the number of links pointing to pirated content through its search results, Google had implemented blocks on generic terms often linked with piracy among which BitTorrent and uTorrent were prominent keywords. Looking at the latest trend for the BitTorrent keyword one can notice that there has been a huge jump in ‘bittorrent’ search – specifically from the second week of March this year.
Further evidence which points to removal of the keywords from the piracy search filter is the inclusion of BitTorrent in autocomplete feature of Google search as shown below:
We are not aware of the full list of keywords which may have been removed from the banned list, but we are completely sure that both BitTorrent and uTorrent have been excluded. We looked into other banned keywords such as “IsoHunt”, and “The Pirate Bay”, and these keywords have been increasingly experiencing drop in search traffic indicating that these two are still in the banned list.
BitTorrent Inc., which has been disappointed with Google’s view of the terms ‘BitTorrent’, has been actively and continuously emphasizing that BitTorrent is not a representative term of piracy and that Google and other search engines should remove the term from the banned list – efforts which have seemingly paid off since March 2013.
