Back in August Google announce it would push down search rankings for pirate sites.  This was greeted with a lot of hoopla by both opponents and proponents of illegal piracy.  But it now appears that this announcement was just newspeak from the GOOrwell Ministry of Truth.

Graham Henderson at Music Canada has just posted an article that puts Google’s claims into question.   In the article Still Searching for Results in Google’s Wasteland of Illegal Sites and Takedown Notices  Henderson details the emptiness of Google’s claims.  A search for Carly Rae Jespersen’s Call Me Maybe  results in zero legitimate music sites on the first page.  The lone exception is the Google owned YouTube.  It’s not till the second page of results that  the 800lb gorilla of the digital retail, iTunes shows up!   Not only does this illustrate the difficulties facing artists it illustrates how tough it is for the legitimate music tech companies to reach their customers.  It’s odd that the myopic music tech companies like Pandora still seem to think it’s the artists that are the enemy.  They refuse to acknowledge that Google is eating their lunch.

It get’s even worse.  We looked at every single link on the first page of search results for “Call Me Maybe Download”.  Google has no incentive to push these infringing links down.   Every link except one apparently generates revenue for Google!!   How?  either directly through Youtube,  by (illegally?) selling advertising on the site hosting the infringing links, or using one of googles many other tools to generate revenue.   We give you the evidence here:

Here is the first page of search results.

Clicking through to the links reveals Google’s DoubleClick serving advertising directly on each these sites or evidence that they have in the past. 5 of these links definitely generate revenue for Google.  Two other  links resulted in queries to Google for ads  but in this case didn’t directly receive ads.  The last two use other google tools to generate revenue    Just like the online pharmacy case Google is complicit in what appears to be illegal activity.  Maybe now the election is over the Obama administration will pursue this.

BeeMP3’s ad traffic has been decimated of late, but google is still selling their android app.