Google strips Pirate Bay homepage from search results

[DaBees-Knees]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/02/google_removes_pirate_bay_homepage/

The Pirate Bay’s homepage and seven other pages relating to the BitTorrent tracker website have been removed from Google’s search engine, following a DMCA complaint. Anyone attempting to locate thepiratebay.org via Google will be greeted with some results to access the website, but none that point directly at its homepage.

We’ve asked Google if it could tell us more about removing some of the site’s pages from its search engine, but at the time of writing it hadn’t got back to us with comment.

The Pirate Bay mouthpiece, Peter Sunde - who actually quit his position as the website’s main spokesman a few months back - asked on his Twitter account this morning “why is 'thepiratebay.org' (the frontpage) removed from your [Google’s] index?”

A DMCA notice at the bottom of a “thepiratebay.org” search query via Google reveals that Mountain View has simply reacted to a takedown request. “In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 8 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org,” reads a notice.

Interestingly, Microsoft’s Bing returns the correct result on its search engine, so it’s clearly not been slapped with a similar DMCA notice yet.

We'll update this story if Google offers us any further insight

Addendum:

Google said on Friday that an error caused the search engine to remove The Pirate Bay from its search pages.

"Google received a (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take-down request that erroneously listed Thepiratebay.org, and as a result, this URL was accidentally removed from the Google search index," Google said in a statement. "We are now correcting the removal, and you can expect to see Thepiratebay.org back in Google search results this afternoon."

Later, Google updated it's statement: "The removal appears to be an internal error and not part of a DMCA request."

Separately, The Pirate Bay's site appeared down Friday afternoon at 1:15 p.m. PT, at least in many U.S. areas.

A very strange excuse !