NEWS - Return to news section

BitTorrent news website TorrentFreak has released research that shows legal music listening options are actually easier to access on Google than pirated alternatives, although only slightly.

Following Google's demotion of piracy related results, based on the number of DMCA notices being received for the website in question, TorrentFreak decided to see if the demotion system is indeed doing its work. In addition, TorrentFreak also tested Google's auto-suggestion tool, which was also modified to remove piracy related keywords. 

By taking several keywords related to currently popular songs, TorrentFreak counted the number of clicks it would take users to get to the song they want, comparing MP3 downloads with legal options, usually YouTube or VEVO music videos.

The conclusion? In almost all of the search cases, including queries such as "Fancy", "Stay With Me" and "Wiggle", the auto-suggested queries along and the resulting search results meant that legal options take less keystrokes to access than the respective pirated options. But the differences are minor, usually one a couple of keystrokes apart.

TorrentFreak's conclusion is that while the Google demotions have made legal options the easier to access option in most cases, the differences are too trivial to have any big impact. The other big conclusion is that most of the legal options were the YouTube/VEVO kind, and that other options like iTunes and other similar sites are not well ranked due to the lack of crawlability of certain results.

"Google has told the record labels that they need to do something about that themselves, by making their sites more crawlable, but it appears that security concerns have hindered progress on that front to the point that sites like MP3Skull with relatively tiny budgets can beat them at every turn," TorrentFreak concludes.