Google made some news last week when it was discovered that they were censoring searches for file-sharing. As Rob Young pointed out this morning on Search Engine Journal, it’s an interesting decision for a company that trumpets the importance of an open Internet; it seems to be totally unlike the Google that took a well-publicized stand against censorship in China.
In the end, though, does censoring searches for pirate-related queries really make a difference? We took a quick look at some common “piratey” themes, like “torrent” and the names of some popular file sharing sites, to see which search engines get the most file-sharing searches.
Google still owns about 85% of all piracy-related searches. Interestingly, the #2 search engine for queries about file sharing is Ask, with about 10x their usual market share; AOL, Bing, and Yahoo all see a very small segment of this type of search.
So, while Google censoring torrent-related searches may be interesting philosophically, it doesn’t seem like it’s making any dent in people actually searching for torrent sites on Google.
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