Google announced in December that they will prevent search terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete, the service that automatically completes your sentence if you start typing in the Google search bar. This is part two of Google’s four step programme “Making Copyright Work Better Online”. The search engine’s new policy towards battling piracy is currently being rolled out, as TorrentFreak.com discovered some keywords were already blocked from Autocomplete, yesterday.

Google: While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find copyright infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose. If you type a query yourself, Google will not block anything in the regular search result on the basis of this anti-piracy policy.

Google insists that it will not alter search results and that copyright infringing sites won’t be removed. They only filter Autocomplete and Instant, the results you see before you hit the enter key.

Without doubt, the “Making Copyright Work Better Online” plan is controversial. 

The film and music industry is probably quite happy, BitTorrent sites and cyberlockers, on the other hand, are appaled by Google. They say the company chose terms without any sort of feedback by users nor with any sensible criteria for what should be included. Google banned the terms BitTorrent, uTorrent, Rapidshare, and Megaupload from Autocomplete, for example, but still allows Vuze, Transmission, The Pirate Bay, Mediafire and Xunlei, according to ZeroPaid.com. Google is one of the investors in the Chinese BitTorrent client Xunlei.

BitTorrent Inc. says the filtering is overly aggressive, especially since it also singles out legal references to the company. “We respect Google’s right to determine algorithms to deliver appropriate search results to user requests,” BitTorrent VP Simon Morris told TorrentFreak. “That being said, our company’s trademarked name is fairly unique, and we’re pretty confident that anyone typing the first six or seven letters deserves the same easy access to results as with any other company search.”

Rapidshare certainly finds the filtering particularly offensive being that German courts have repeatedly determined that third parties using the service, and not the site itself, are the ones making copyrighted material “publicly available” and therefore guilty of infringement. They even lobbied in Washington DC to convince members of Congress that were keen on filtering the site via the proposed Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeit Act (COICA) that it caters mainly to “legitimate interests.” Rapidshare may now want to send the same lobbying outfit to Google Headquarters to plead its case there.

In the meantime, it is interesting to see which search terms Google adds from here, now that the search engine has established a framework for preventing terms it believes are “being used to find infringing content” from appearing in Autocomplete. At the moment it is also unknown when step three of Google’s plan, “to expel copyright violators from the AdSense program” will be implemented.

Last December, Google has also announced that, in addition to discouraging links to illegal downloading, they will promote search results that lead to authorized file sharing platforms.

Sources: TorrentFreak, ZeroPaid