Major Torrent Sites Will Be Blocked By Major Search Engines, Is This The End Of Torrent Era?

The three major torrent providers: The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and ExtraTorrents will not appear on Google, Yahoo and other search results anymore. This is to ensure that the amount of piracy on the internet, especially piracy of TV series episodes and movies, will be reduced. But this is for UK only.

According to a report from Torrent Freak, search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing will start to remove search results from The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and ExtraTorrents starting June 1, 2017. Not only Torrent sites are targeted in this Torrent blockage, but also sites that offers links to pirated contents, like TV and films.

The UK's Intellectual Property Office brought together the biggest search engine companies and entertainment companies to discuss the matters about widespread piracy on the Internet. And they have come with a solution that involves a voluntary agreement that is closed to being signed. The participants will agree into implementing changes into their codes and algorithms to completely block all the sites that offers contents that violates infringement laws.

According to Tech Worm, the new piracy code should be introduced within four months. All search engine firms that will participate in this agreement is expected to block all torrent search results starting June 1 this year.

Piracy has been one of the most formidable opponent of search engines, especially Google. Google has received billions of takedown requests and is only for last year. With this, and together with Yahoo and Bing, Google is expected to be stricter on showing search results.

"The search engines involved in this work have been very co-operative, making changes to their algorithms and processes, but also working bilaterally with creative industry representatives to explore the options for new interventions, and how existing processes might be streamlined," said Baroness Buscombe, an English Barrister in the UK Parliament.