Google has removed the carousel of pirate sites that once appeared when “best torrent sites” was searched for.
As you may know, contents within search results carousels are not hand curated by Google.
TorrentFreak reports the company conducted an investigation into what was appearing for the “best torrent sites” query, and ultimately decided to remove the carousel.
However, one must question whether or not that makes any difference compared to what is showing up instead.
Now, when “best torrent sites” is searched for, it returns a featured snippet box which pulls in content from TorrentFreak of the best torrent sites. So, in a way, searchers are still being directed to illegal torrent sites.
A Google spokesperson told TorrentFreak:
We have investigated this particular issue and determined that this results carousel wasn’t working in the intended manner, and we have now fixed the issue.”
Google’s “intended manner” likely didn’t involve a carousel of torrent sites, so it has “fixed the issue” by removing the carousel.
Perhaps Google will consider investigating the issue even further, because it’s still relatively easy to access the torrent sites that were featured in the carousel.
