TorrentFreak published an interesting article over the weekend: ‘What’s That Torrent Thing Google Keeps Suggesting?’. It focuses on the new Google Instant technology, which serves up results as people type in their search queries. The article points out that typing in certain movie or game names suggests a search query including ‘torrent’. And it’s true of music too: type ‘kanye west my dark’ into Google Instant, and by the time you hit the ‘k’, ‘kanye west my dark twisted fantasy torrent’ is the second suggested search. Type in ‘take that progress’ and ‘take that progress torrent’ is the fourth suggested search. It’s not such a huge shock, but this is subtly different from returning torrent links in regular search results – Google is arguably suggesting to users that they can append ‘torrent’ to their actual search query.
Is Google Instant fuelling piracy? Well…
