Shrugs off Google filtering its name from Autocomplete, and has already been working overtime to diminish their relationship as much as possible. Repeats refrain that Google is the one guilty of “hosting the world largest index of pirated content.”

Yesterday I mentioned how Google had suddenly decided to live up it to a promise it made last month to “prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete.”
The effort was part of its goal for “Making Copyright Work Better Online,” a four part plan to “better address”what it calls the “bad apples who use the Internet to infringe copyright.”

However, so far the terms it’s decided to filter from Autocomplete are arbitrary at best. It banned terms like BitTorrent, uTorrent, Rapidshare, and Megaupload for example, but still allows Vuze, Transmission, The Pirate Bay, and Mediafire.
Asked Megaupload what they thought about Google filtering their name from Autocomplete and I was told they really didn’t care, that the more private the site is the better.
“That’s great news for us,” Bonnie Lam told me in an email from Megaupload HQ. “We are making it hard for the Google crawler to index Megaupload links on our sites for several years now.”

She directed me to a Google trends graph illustrating its efforts to keep Megaupload links off of Google as much as possible.
As you can see below, it’s steadily decreased since peaking towards the end of 2009.



“As you can see Rapidshare gets the largest search volume of all file hosters. But Mega is larger in terms of traffic and users. And we have achieved that without Google. We like the links of our users to remain private! That is why we don’t provide a search feature on our site,” added Lam.

So when it comes down to it Megaupload shrugs off Google filtering its name from Autocomplete, and has even been working overtime to diminish their relationship as much as possible. It’s a good move on their part since it obviously reduces their visibility and potential for complaints by copyright holder critics.
Megaupload also repeats the refrain it made after the US Chamber of Commerce blasted it for being a “rogue site” supposedly profiting at the “expense” of the American creative industries, that Google hosts by far much more pirated content than any other site in the world.
“We are unfairly on the radar of the MPAA and RIAA while Google is hosting the world largest index of pirated content,” said Lam.
All in all filtering terms from Autocomplete is fairly benign when you think about it, but it does hint at the potential for a disturbing trend in which Google could decide to filter terms “closely associated with piracy” from the search results as well.