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I wonder if this isn't at least partly a sneaky way to penalize pirate sites without needing to wade into the intractable question of copyright. There seems to be a strong correlation between a site's sketchiness and the likelihood that it will plaster obnoxious ads all over the top of every page, and the timing is weirdly coincidental if not.

(I really hope this doesn't derail one of the few non-SOPA threads. But that's the most relevant motivation I can think of for this change.)



any serious 'pirate site' has absolutely no ads. The only 'pirate sites' that have ads are the ones open to the public - and they are not so serious, but rather unreliable with no community. I am guessing you are not a member of a private tracker.


I said pirate, not private. Private trackers may be where the most hardcore pirates hang out, but theyre still only a fraction of all pirate sites. What you're saying here is precisely cognate to the No True Scotsman fallacy.


> But that's the most relevant motivation I can think of for this change.

Really? You think "a sneaky way to penalize pirate sites" is a more relevant motivation than "help users find information more easily by trying to filter out sites that have so many ads they obscure content"?


Yes. The latter motivation is not at all timely. I don't see any reason for Google to be more concerned about it than they have been for the last five years.


> Yes. The latter motivation is not at all timely. I don't see any reason for Google to be more concerned about it than they have been for the last five years.

So you're under the assumption that Google implemented every quality-related change to the core ranking algorithms - every change they ever wanted - 5 years ago, and now they just sit around and react to politics.

Gotcha.




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