As much as I despise multi-billion dollar 'copyright holding' corporations, I feel this is a strategic move by Google to thrust more legitimate channels of media consumption (Netflix, Prime Video, Et al) to the top of the search results page.
Having said that, people who actually use torrents regularly know their way around Google and other web-based search engines, and this move, therefore, should have little or no effect on that particular demographic.
Forget pirate sites, Google is doing this for everything. I'm shocked at how often a search for some generic word or animal name brings up some company I've never heard of, with the Wikipedia page for that generic word buried at the bottom of the first page (sometimes pushed to the second page).
I switched to DDG permanently because of their other bangs. I am a baseball fan and regularly use FanGraphs to look at stats. If I google a baseball player, FanGraphs isn't even on the front page. Instead, I have news articles about him, tweets from him, and a bunch of other sites. With DDG, I can simply go "!fg jose bautista" and get exactly what I want. It really has saved me a lot of time and effort. Same thing with !w for wikipedia.
Do other browsers not have site search in the address bar? In Safari, after visiting "fangraphs.com" once, I can just type "fang Some Name", press the down arrow to select the first suggestion, hit enter, and it searches that site.
Wow... I always hated how sometimes the results for really niche things would not be found by DDG so I swapped back to evil corp search. I can't believe I haven't used these !g commands before! Thanks
I find myself using Bing all the time precisely for this reason.
I would love to subscribe to netflix, hulu, hbo, etc but all my favorite TV shows are always on different networks. I wouldn't mind paying for the service (but not for 3 of them), but the online streaming mirrors are really good at what they do.
Bing just works. Its has significantly less bias than google which is why I always use 2 search engines.
As a subscriber of Netflix it's trash for my tastes now. Many of the shows I did enjoy are no longer on the service and once my subscription runs out I won't be renewing it.
Documentaries just don't pay the bills and I think it's killed off a lot of potential for good content.
Chris Bell is someone who I heard talk recently on a podcast about this. He makes documentaries and discussed how hard it is just to break even making a documentary because of how Netflix/HBO/etc structure deals and vendor lock in.
I think this helps people who legitimately want to get some piece of content and are confused/misled when they stumble upon a pirate/torrent site. They don't know what bittorrent is and are confused when they think they can download a movie and end up with a .torrent or a magnet link.
The way Google returns results is totally different than 15 ways ago. When it was once algorithmically, impartially sorted, it favorised spreading of information without political or judgemental intents. Now Google, while still not evil, has been forced to censor itself over the years, and is not an impartial research engine anymore. If Google keeps reinforcing the system, who will propose alternatives? Where will we find new ideas?
Edit : To me "piracy" of music was a new idea : free access and distribution of digital contents, because we technologically can, and it doesn't kill anyone
Having said that, people who actually use torrents regularly know their way around Google and other web-based search engines, and this move, therefore, should have little or no effect on that particular demographic.