In Spain, both The Pirate Bay and dozens of websites linked to the popular torrent indexer have been blocked for years by court decision, and yet if we searched for the pirate bay on Google, the relevant results would appear, such as the original domain that returned in 2020.
This has changed recently. Although in TorrentFreak they have indicated that Google is censoring ‘The Pirate Bay’ and other domains in various countries, Spain is not mentioned, but in Genbeta we have verified that in fact the related results have disappeared and are different in the Google version for the United States, for example.
Neither proxies nor original
Although for years Google had refused to remove domains from the results, it seems that we live in other times. In March 2021, the Dutch group BREIN had sent Google a copy of the court orders that forced ISPs to block various domains related to The Pirate Bay, and Google removed the domains from its results even though the search engine was not mentioned in the decisions.
Now it seems that the same measures are being extended to other countries such as France, Norway, Brazil and Spain, while law firms in Sweden and the United Kingdom are already pressuring Google to implement the same measures.
In the case of Google Spain, results of some of the famous sites that offer proxies to just access different domains of The Pirate Bay where this has been blocked, they no longer appear when searching with those keywords, although some continue to appear if we add “proxy” to the search.
The results of Bing in Spain do show the original domain of The Pirate Bay in the first result, just like Google in the US, so the block, at the moment, seems to affect only the Google search engine in specific countries.
If something is proven, it is quite difficult if not impossible to eliminate all relevant results from these types of sites, and even if all domains are blocked, the Internet always creates new ones. However, once you remove something from Google, you bury it even to many more eyes than ISPs manage to block.