Google freaked out the collective Internet last month when they announced the controversial plan to add DMCA takedown notices into account when providing search results. This would make it so that sites with questionable reputations would be placed below more legitimate sites. It was obviously an attempt to make peace with the copyright industry that has long blamed Google for enabling piracy. It would appear that Google is giving in even more to the content industry with their latest move.

It was revealed today by TorrentFreak that Google is now blocking The Pirate Bay from showing up in Google’s instant or autocomplete searches. When searching for The Pirate Bay, users would normally type it in as one text string like “thepiratebay.” When searching for the site like that, you will now get these results:

What’s funny is that The Pirate Party and the UK proxy for The Pirate Bay both show up. Those searching for The Pirate Bay may instead end up at the Web site for The Pirate Party and learn of their values in regards to file sharing. I’m sure the MPAA and RIAA wouldn’t like the youth of our nation converting to Kopimism.

Like always, performing a direct search still won’t block The Pirate Bay from showing up in search results.

It should be noted that Google is the only search provider that is blocking The Pirate Bay on the autocomplete level. Bing still refers would be pirates to the torrent tracker after just typing in “thepirate.”

What does The Pirate Bay think about this latest attempt to drive traffic away from them? They really don’t care. They told TorrentFreak that they haven’t noticed a decline in referrals from Google. Besides, they previously noted that they consider themselves a search engine that’s competing with Google. More direct searches only serves to give them more advertising dollars.

Even if The Pirate Bay doesn’t care, it’s still worth nothing how Google never enters kill mode with the Web site and other torrent trackers. They may delist them from autocomplete or instant answers, but these can still be found on Google with relative ease. I don’t see things getting too out of hand until Google outright censors The Pirate Bay or others from appearing in search results.