Inside Search
The official Google Search blog
An update to our search algorithms
August 10, 2012
We aim to provide a great experience for our users and have developed over 200 signals to ensure our search algorithms deliver the best possible results. Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of
valid copyright removal notices
we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on
NPR’s music website
, a TV show on
Hulu
or new music streamed from
Spotify
.
Since we re-booted our copyright removals over two years ago, we’ve been given much more data by copyright owners about infringing content online. In fact, we’re now receiving and processing more copyright removal notices every day than we did in all of 2009—
more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone
. We will now be using this data as a signal in our search rankings.
Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed; Google cannot determine whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law. So while this new signal will influence the ranking of some search results, we won’t be removing any pages from search results unless we
receive
a valid copyright removal notice from the rights owner. And we’ll continue to provide "
counter-notice
" tools so that those who believe their content has been wrongly removed can get it reinstated. We’ll also continue to be
transparent
about copyright removals.
Posted by Amit Singhal, SVP, Engineering
Labels
flight search
images
knowledge graph
local
mobile
quick answers
Search Blog
search quality
search stories
search tips
trends
universal search
webmasters
Archive
2016
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Feed
Google
on
Follow @google
Follow
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
Follow