Andre Yoskowitz
21 Feb 2013 21:15
Last year, Google publicly announced it would be demoting all accused piracy sites in its search rankings.
This week, the RIAA has said the search giant is ineffective at preventing piracy, and the sites are just as easy to find as they ever were.
The RIAA, which is a trade group for the major record labels, initially applauded the decision but now seems to have turned to their usual negativity.
"We have found no evidence that Google's policy has had a demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy," the RIAA added. "These sites consistently appear at the top of Google's search results for popular songs or artists."
For their report, the group searched for Billboard Top 100 hits, such as "Diamond" by Rihanna and "Locked Out of Heaven" by Bruno Mars.
The group tracked sites that Google themselves identify as "serial infringers" in their Copyright Transparency Report, and says that they were still "on page 1" in Google search results "over 98 percent of the time." Google defines a serial ingfringer as a site that is accused multiple times of hosting unauthorized content by copyright holders.
On the other end of the spectrum, "Well-known, authorized download sites, such as iTunes, Amazon and eMusic, only appeared in the top ten results for a little more than half of the searches. This means that a site for which Google has received thousands of copyright removal requests was almost 8 times more likely to show up in a search result than an authorized music download site...In other words, whatever Google has done to its search algorithms to change the ranking of infringing sites, it doesn't appear to be working."