Under the pressure of content industry, the search giant had to implement a few changes to its engine. This included blacklisting piracy-related terms from appearing in its Autocomplete and Instant services. From the very beginning, Google blacklisted both “BitTorrent” and “uTorrent”, but recently unbanned these keywords, which caused a sharp increase in search traffic.

Internet users searching for such terms as “The Pirate Bay” or “MegaUpload” will find no suggestions or search results appearing before they type in the full word. It doesn’t mean that the webpages are removed from the engine’s index, but this move still caused a sharp decrease in searches for these terms.

However, it is unclear what triggers a keyword to be included in the blacklist. Google explained they remove terms “closely associated with piracy” without revealing further details. The company never published the full list of banned words, but “BitTorrent” and “uTorrent” were there from the start. Both terms are trademarks of BitTorrent Inc., which was rather disappointed that the search giant labeled them as “piracy related”.

BitTorrent Inc. has always been emphasizing that BitTorrent doesn’t equal piracy. It seems that this effort has finally paid off – both terms are now absent from Google’s piracy filter, and as a result searches for both terms rocketed, resulting in an increase in visitors to the respective websites.

This is the first time that the search engine has removed terms from its search filter. The most interesting fact is that MegaUpload still remains blocked, although it doesn’t exist for almost two years.

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t announce or comment the reasons to include certain terms in the list. For example, the company has recently added the name of the popular music streaming service Grooveshark to the list. The latter has had its fair share of legal troubles, but is now licensed by the major labels.

Internet users worry about over-blocking, but the rights owners have been arguing the opposite. A few days ago the Motion Picture Association of America released a report calling Google and other search engines major piracy facilitators and saying that they should step up their anti-piracy efforts. Apparently, now Google will have to find a balance between these two forces.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article