Google Promotes Music With News Ad Units, Demotes Piracy In Search

Rightsholders have accused Google of promoting piracy since the dawn of search. The online giant's efforts to end the practice have been frustratingly incremental. But they took several steps forward with some significant announcements over the last few days that include downgraded search results for pirate sites and upgraded ad units that promote music and other media better.

In 2012, Google announced they'd downrank sites which received a large number of valid DMCA notices. They now say they’ve :refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites." The update will roll out globally starting this week.

Google is also removing more terms from auto-complete, based on DMCA removal notices."We’ve begun demoting auto-complete predictions that return results with many DMCA demoted sites," says Google

Additionaly, new ad units are designed to point fans to legitimate sources of music and other media.

Google has tweaked the right-hand panel on the results page and promise that it will be part of more music related searches. For now,these results show in the U.S. only. but Google has plans to expand to expand it internationally.