Anyone entering the term ‘The Pirate Bay’ into a search engine should expect to get The Pirate Bay’s website as the top or close to top result, since that’s what the search demands. However, depending on where you are in the world and what variant of Google search you use, results can vary quite dramatically.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Search engine results are something on which any Internet user should be able to rely. After entering a search term, we generally expect the most relevant results to appear at the top, which seems like a fair assumption.
That being said, all searches aren’t equal, even when the same parameters are entered into the same company’s product. Case in point: Google Search and The Pirate Bay.
We’ve known for years that due to entertainment industry pressure, Google has been demoting pirate sites in its search results. That’s perhaps understandable when trying to deter a user from finding specific content via a Google search but should that affect a search about the site itself?
If one types the term The Pirate Bay into Google, there is no reason for the site iin question not to appear at the top of the list. After all, it’s the most informative result for one of the world’s most popular sites. However, tests carried out by TF show that some Google search variants coupled with certain countries’ IP addresses produce dramatically different results.
In all tests we began with an incognito Chrome browser window, to ensure no previous behavior affected our results. We then commenced testing searches for The Pirate Bay, with the UK up first. We know that Google has been under pressure to demote pirate sites in the country, so it wasn’t a surprise to find a relatively poor result.
Using a UK-based IP address to access Google.co.uk, we had to click through to the fifth page of results to find the entry for thepiratebay.org, the site’s main domain.
Google.co.uk, accessed via a UK IP address
However, when we carried out exactly the same test on Google.co.uk but after substituting our UK IP address for one located in the United States, a very different result was achieved. As can be seen in the image below, thepiratebay.org now appears as the very top result, as it should.
Google.co.uk, accessed via a US IP address
Given the above, there’s the suggestion that Google only penalizes users of Google.co.uk searching for The Pirate Bay, if they’re using a UK-based IP address. So we switched things around a little bit to try and find out.
Testing Google.com with a US-based IP address, thepiratebay.org appeared as the top result, as expected. Then, when accessing Google.com with a UK-based IP address, thepiratebay.org was relegated to the sixth page of Google results, which wasn’t a surprise.
Thus far, one could be forgiven for thinking that having a UK-based IP address is the poisoned chalice here. So, with that in mind, we switched over to the Netherlands for some testing there.
Using a Netherlands-based IP address on Google.nl, thepiratebay.org appears as the first result. But, to our surprise, deploying a UK IP address on the same service returns exactly the same position, i.e right at the very top. The same was true for searches carried out on Google.ca (Canada). No matter what IP addresses were used, thepiratebay.org appeared at the top of results.
Of course, The Pirate Bay has been blocked in the UK for some time, so people may have switched away from searching directly for The Pirate Bay towards other proxy services, for example. However, that doesn’t change the indisputable fact that a search for The Pirate Bay should list the site as the first result – because that’s what people are looking for.
But if people think that only UK-based searchers are getting a raw deal, then they should reconsider.
Over in India, using an Indian IP address to access Google.co.in, thepiratebay.org doesn’t appear until page 8. Somewhat unexpectedly, doing a similar search on the same Google variant using a UK IP address actually improved matters, with thepiratebay.org appearing more readily on page 6.
A lowly page 8 for Indian searchers of The Pirate Bay
But in terms of results, there are other countries doing even worse. Tests carried out on Google.fr (France) reveal that thepiratebay.org doesn’t appear until page 12, a result matched identically by Google.ru (Russia), no matter which source IP addresses were used.
To be clear, it’s not like Google doesn’t understand the significance of the site in these low-ranking regions or that searchers aren’t interested. Although it doesn’t place the actual site until a dozen pages down the road, Google is very happy to list dozens of proxies in the first sets of results, including some fake ‘Pirate Bay’ sites that Google itself flags up as unsafe due to malware.
Overall, it’s hard to find much consistency but it’s reasonable to presume that at least to some extent, searches for The Pirate Bay are being manipulated, depending on where you live and which search variant people use. For English speakers, Canada seems a good variant for now. But that could change at any moment.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
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