Google blacklists Grooveshark from autocomplete

Look who’s giving the likes of The Pirate Bay company in Google’s Piracy Search Filter – Grooveshark. The search giant has quietly expanded its list of censored phrases to add the music streaming service onto it, but has not specified why Grooveshark was put on to it.

Reported first by TorrentFreak, it has been noted that Google will not suggest “Grooveshark” on autocomplete when you start typing in the words. You will need to type in the entire word and press enter in order to coax Google to show you a relevant result.

Google Search’s autocomplete feature is a great help when you don’t have exact information about what you’re looking for or are hunting for suggestions. However, the search engine has a blacklist where it makes it very difficult to search for certain words and phrases.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

Gogole doesn’t know what you’re talking about

Traditionally, Google has blacklisted cuss words, vulgar slang and pretty much anything a curious child might stumble upon or may be embarrassing in a work environment. Since the past couple of years, Google has also been using this blacklist to hide “piracy-related” terms from Google Search, including “The Pirate Bay”.

Grooveshark’s addition to the list does not come as a complete surprise, since Google had received quite a few DMCA takedown notices for the website—one of the factors used to determine whether or not a filter needs to be applied. While Grooveshark has been treading on murky waters of online streaming of music, it has played relatively safe by having had negotiated licensing deals with indie music labels. Major labels were not too pleased with their content being on Grooveshark, though, as they had not agreed to a deal with it.

Google did not offer much by way of why Grooveshark was particularly targeted, but said that it was removing terms from autocomplete that were closely associated with infringing results. “When evaluating terms for inclusion, we examine several factors, including correlation between the term and results that have been subject to valid DMCA takedown notices,” a spokesperson from Google said. Algorithms or not, do not expect Grooveshark to pop up on autocomplete any time soon.