PIRATE Bay and other torrent websites are being targeted by Google in a major crackdown against piracy.

Pirate Bay is one of the most popular torrent websites around, but it and its rivals have been stung by Google in a new crackdown against piracy.

The search engine giant have this week made it more difficult for people trying to access pirated content that illegally breaches copyright laws.

Previously, if people searched for ‘best torrent sites’ on Google they would be greeted with a results carousel.

This gave suggestions for a host of popular torrent websites like The Pirate Bay, 1337x, Rarbg and IsoHunt.

It even featured incorrectly legitimate streaming services like Hulu and Crackle alongside illegal alternatives like Putlocker and Alluc.

But this week the search results carousel has disappeared, with Google saying the displayed results were all “generated algorithmically”.

Speaking to The Next Web, the spokesperson added it did not “reflect what [the company] had in mind for this feature".

Besides filtering out illegal streaming services from results for streaming sites, the carousel has now been blocked from displaying torrent sites.

In other torrent news, Google appears to be trying to hit torrent sites where they hurt with the upcoming release of their Google Chrome ad blocker.

A few weeks ago, Google announced Chrome would start blocking “annoying” adverts by default soon.

Adverts that will be affected are those which don’t fall within the “better ads standards” including pop-up ads.

Chrome is the world’s most popular browser, and the leading browser for many torrent websites.

The upcoming ad blocker is expected to have a big effect on torrent sites and the revenue they bring in.

The owner of one torrent site, who did not want to be named, told TorrentFreak that the Google Chrome ad blocker could signal the end of torrents.

They said: “The torrent site economy is in a bad state. Profits are very low. Profits are f***** compared to previous years.

“Chrome’s ad-blocker will kill torrent sites. If they don’t at least cover their costs, no one is going to use money out of his pocket to keep them alive.

“I won’t be able to do so at least.”

Just a few months ago, one popular torrent site - TorrentHound - shut down citing a lack in revenue as one of the main reasons.

If torrent sites are unable to generate enough revenue through advertisements, they have few options left to keep running.

This year popular torrent websites like Kickass Torrents, ExtraTorrent and Torrentz.eu have all shut down.

Despite being shut down, Kickass Torrents was appearing in the now defunct Google carousel for the search term 'best torrent sites'.

we have another browsers thanks Firefox, but i dont think chrome will do nothing, but yes google crawler is everytime doing it

the copyright is the most important thing. so it's hard to maintain the torrent-tracker which shares everything, phew...