Exploring Google Search's tenuous relationship with pirated content

According to a recently released paper "How Google Fights Piracy" (available here as a Google Doc), the search giant claims that fans intent on pirating media use pirate sites rather than search. Despite Google's insistence that its search function is not the preferred doorway to copyrighted content, Mountain View says it "has taken steps to prevent terms closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete and Related Search."

The exact whats and hows of Google's search algorithm has long been shrouded in mystery, but I found it to be particularly foggy when it comes to playing around to searching specific terms related to the copyright-free lifestyle.

Last week the British Music Industry trade group, BPI requested for Google to block a number of URLs from its search function, citing copyright infringement. Included in the list of rouge sites were several urls from the torrent-search site The Pirate Bay.

Of the 2056 URLs that BPI asked to have removed—including 171 from The Pirate Bay—only one had no action taken against it: The Pirate Bay's current homepage, www.piratebay.sx.

Why? Google doesn't say specifically, but it's probably because although the TPB homepage allows users to search for torrents that no doubt contain pirated property, The Pirate Bay's front page itself does not actually list or contain any copyright-protected information.

The Pirate Bay homepage.

According to Google's compliance FAQ page:

It is our policy to respond to clear and specific notices of alleged copyright infringement. Upon review, we may discover that one or more URLs specified in a copyright removal request clearly did not infringe copyrights. In those cases we will decline to remove those URLs from Search.

This isn't so newsworthy, as BPI is one of the most active senders of DMCA requests, and The Pirate Bay is one of the most targeted DMCA takedown recipients. (According to Google, TPB has had nearly 460 thousand URLs requested to be removed.) However, despite the fact that Google has determined that The Pirate Bay's front page should remain indexable and available, Mountain View has constructed a strange maze of semantic filters regarding "The Pirate Bay" and other pirate sites within its autocomplete functions.

In 2009, Google completely removed The Pirate Bay from its search index, only to eventually return TPB's homepage to searchability. The Pirate Bay is currently available through Google, but remains somewhat hidden via the site's autocomplete function. For example, on the US Google site, searching the term "The Pirate Bay" will not bring up the site's front page in Google's autocomplete results.

Meanwhile, the autocomplete for the conjoined url phrase "thepiratebay" will bring up some sketchy sites (that you should NOT click on) rather than TPB's official site. However, if you add in a period to your search ("thepiratebay."), the Pirate Bay's homepage will magically appear in the main search field below the bar.

Meanwhile, search for a phrase like like "the pirate bay eminem", "the pirate bay ironman" or "the pirate bay sisterhood of the travelling pants 2" will all return relevant torrent searches within The Pirate Bay. While the returns will not be available in the main search field until you click it, this is a curious loophole in the Mountain View's search filtering algorithm.

Meanwhile, the top-level urls for sites included in BPI's most recent DCMA request, such as for mp3chief.com, will autocomplete on the US Site when you search for the terms "MP3 Chief" or "mp3chief" in autocomplete with associated links in the returns page below the search bar.

In fact, Google autocomplete worked for many (but not all) urls included in BPI's DMCA request including, nakido.com (under search term "nakido"), free-albums.net ("free-albums"), and indowebster.com ("indowebster").

According to Google's autocomplete FAQ, the autocomplete terms are the algorithm-driven result of "search activity from all web users and the content of web pages indexed by Google." Google also readily acknowledges that the autocomplete function is does not roam completely unchecked. In addition to filtering out "objectionable" material such as pornography, violence, or hate speech in the autocomplete function, the company filters out terms that "are frequently used to find content that infringes copyrights."

Google's position on its autocomplete function becomes even more curious when you consider how it relates to porn searches. If you were search for the domain name of a well-known pornography site—which Google explicitly says it will filter though its autocomplete—it will not turn up in autocomplete. This is true for a number of sites I tried with seemingly innocuous url names. Unlike The Pirate Bay searches, you will not receive a proper autocomplete even if you conjoin the words together and include the period afterwards. Try it if you're at home on a work computer—assuming you know the name of at least one adult site.

We have contacted Google for clarification on their autocomplete functionality and will update when and if we receive any response.

Evan lives in Brooklyn, NY and enjoys writing about what future may hold and taking long romantic walks on the beach.
More by Evan Dashevsky

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Apple and the enterprise: A complicated relationship

When Microsoft shipped Windows 2000 and Active Directory, Apple didn’t really have a solution for identity management or for linking Macs to an enterprise network. The company was just beginning the transition from its classic Mac OS—the first version of which had shipped on the first Mac in 1984—to OS X. Although Apple did ship a public beta of OS X in second half of the year, the final release didn’t arrive until March 2001.

The classic Mac OS was not for multi-user systems. It offered limited user account creation and management for file sharing between Macs, but there was no built-in mechanism for logging into an individual Mac—it booted right to the desktop, where you had full access to the entire file system and all installed software.

Apple did make a couple of attempts to create a multi-user system, however. In the early 1990s, the company shipped At Ease, which provided some multi-user support, first on a single Mac and later for multiple Macs on a network. But At Ease never gained much traction beyond some pockets of the education market for it which it seemed to be designed.

In planning the transition to the true multi-user environment of OS X, Apple added a modicum of multi-user functions in Mac OS 9 that allowed each Mac to support multiple users with basic file permissions, individual user settings and preferences, and limited account-based restrictions. Apple also created Macintosh Manager, which redirected Mac OS 9’s multi-user functions to a server-based data store and copied certain settings and configuration files from that data store to an individual Mac. It wasn’t really an enterprise-grade solution, even when incorporated into the first few releases of OS X Server, but it was a functional pre-OS X stop-gap.

Apple’s first real move toward enterprise functionality, including identity management, came with OS X and OS X Server. The first release of OS X was essentially the Unix-based core of NeXTStep with an Apple-inspired GUI on top of it. NeXT gave OS X solid enterprise bones right away, including support for local and network user accounts.

NeXTStep and the first releases of OS X and OS X Server relied on a proprietary user and client management system known as NetInfo. Functionally, NetInfo served many of the same roles as Active Directory. It allowed for centralized user and computer accounts and user authentication for access to network resources; worked with the file system to support a POSIX permissions model; and it could be used to define user settings and experience in the same way group policies do in Active Directory.

Although NetInfo worked and remained in the mix of Apple’s enterprise components for several years, it had some serious limitations. The biggest one: It was proprietary and didn’t integrate with other platforms.

The other achilles heel for NetInfo in early OS X releases was that it didn’t support directory server replication. That meant that either a single server had to support the enterprise identity functionality for an entire organization or multiple servers—each with a unique directory of users, computers and configuration data—had to be deployed. Even though it was possible for Macs to search for enterprise identity data across multiple servers, the process was far from the multi-master replication capabilities of Active Directory domain controllers.

The proprietary nature of NetInfo led Apple to sell a complete end-to-end solution to enterprise IT. Today, Apple is well known for its end-to-end approach to technology; in many ways, it’s been a winning strategy because it allows Apple to maximize profits and create a controlled ecosystem. It’s also the same strategy that allowed Apple to disrupt industries so effectively and deliver some of the most polished products on the market. iTunes, with its link to the iPod and iOS, is the greatest example of what Apple can achieve using it.

Apple didn’t have a lot of luck selling that end-to-end system to enterprise IT. Part of that was because of the proprietary nature of Apple’s solutions. But the company was also still pulling back from its near collapse in the mid-to-late 1990s. At the time, its market share was abysmally low and it was a complete outlier in virtually every business market.

OS X Panther (and Panther Server) was one of the most important releases of OS X from an enterprise perspective. It rectified the limitations of NetInfo by introducing a broad-based solution for enterprise identity and directory services. It also added support for Active Directory. That represented a major shift in Apple’s strategy, as the company quietly acknowledged it couldn’t succeed in business without really offering support for existing enterprise systems.

Open Directory was technically a collection of directory and identity technologies that included NetInfo support, with a connection for legacy NetInfo server as well as for storing local accounts and records as well as an LDAP-based replacement for NetInfo’s proprietary data store. In practice, Open Directory became synonymous with Apple’s LDAP implementation; as that was integrated with Kerberos, it represented a replacement for NetInfo. In addition to being based on open standards, the Open Directory architecture included support for directory server replication. Even so, it remained a master/slave replication environment that was more like Windows NT’s use of a primary server and one or more backup servers than Active Directory.

Panther was one of the most important OS X releases from an enterprise perspective. It rectified the limitations of NetInfo by introducing a broad-based solution for enterprise identity and directory services.

The scalability advances, which continued to improve in later OS X and OS X Server releases, were only part of the advantage Apple gained by deprecating and eventually discontinuing NetInfo. The other was a move to open standards, including LDAP and Kerberos, the technologies at the foundation of Active Directory. As a result, Apple was able to offer Active Directory integration on Macs running Panther and later releases.

Out of the box the integration was pretty limited. Apple’s Active Directory plug-in for Open Directory only mapped three attributes for user account records (username, password, and home directory), but Apple offered three ways to deepen that integration: extend the Active Directory schema to include the new records and attributes used by Open Directory, map the Apple-defined records and attributes to existing but unused Active Directory counterparts, or use what was called the magic triangle. That involved Macs that were joined to the Active Directory domain for enterprise identity and user authentication and to an Open Directory domain for Mac client management.

Apple also allowed third-party companies to produce their own Open Directory plug-ins to support additional directory types like Novell’s eDirectory or provide new capabilities when using Active Directory. Centrify, an enterprise identity management developer, was one of the first companies to offer more powerful Active Directory integration. Its Direct Control for Mac, which is still on the market, allows Active Directory admins to manage Macs using group policies stored in Active Directory without modifying the schema. Group Policy options are available for virtually every Mac client and user management option available from Apple.

2007 was a big year for Apple. It introduced the iPhone that summer and it OS X Leopard that fall. Leopard was among the most feature-packed OS X releases to come out of Apple and boasted more than 300 features and improvements. The most notable enterprise identity change in Leopard was that Apple finally phased out NetInfo, which was until then still used for storing local user accounts on Macs.

Leopard Server, on the other hand, included key features that would eventually determine Apple’s current place in the enterprise. The first was a new option for joining Macs and Mac servers to an Active Directory domain. To streamline Mac integration with Active Directory, Apple created a new type of Open Directory mechanism known as augmented records. It essentially simplified the magic triangle approach. A user’s Active Directory data still managed his or her enterprise identity and authentication, but Leopard Server could automatically include just the Apple-specified records needed for OS X Server services or client management. Everything else was passed to Active Directory.

This streamlined approach was part of a new form of OS X Server setup and administration. For small organizations or Mac-centric workgroups at a large company, Apple introduced simplified management by way of a new tool called Server Preferences. It allowed users with limited technical skills to set up and manage a server running a subset of the most commonly used business services: file and printer sharing, email and chat, websites and wikis, backup and VPN access.

This approach showed that Apple was willing to work with existing enterprise technologies. Specifically, it showed that Apple was happy to leave enterprise identity in the hands of Active Directory. And it marked one of the first instances of Apple marketing an enterprise product, in this case, Leopard Server, directly to users rather than to IT shops. That approach has been viewed as fueling the success of iOS devices—and the BYOD trend—in business.

Though it wasn’t obvious at the time, Apple was also the beginning to refocus OS X Server as a small business solution rather than an enterprise server OS.

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Review: Cloze prioritizes email by strength of relationship

Cloze Cloze offers interesting insights into some of your most important online relationships, but its value as an inbox tamer is limited.

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Cloze is supposed to help you deal with inbox overload, but I have to admit that this free service initially made me a bit anxious. After using it for a while, though, I came to appreciate its relationship-centered approach to email and social networking.

Somehow, an overall of Cloze score of 47 didn't seem very impressive.

This Web service reduces the noise and clutter of messaging overload by focusing on your relationships with correspondents. It doesn't stop at email, either: Cloze works with the Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter social networks as well. When you connect an account to Cloze, it pulls in all of the communications you've had with your contacts, and then presents your email messages to you arranged by contact—and their presumed importance to you—not by the medium from which the communication hails.

Cloze delivers your messages in a daily digest, but you can also access them anytime from the Web app or the iOS app…and it was the Web app that that caused my first pangs of anxiety. They were caused by my overall Cloze score, which was 47 out of 100. Cloze tells you that your Cloze scores is a measure of your relationship quality, with a score of 70 indicating a very strong relationship over time.

Thanks to this dispiriting number, I began using Cloze already feeling as though I had a lot of catching up to do. I felt better when I saw that Cloze rated my individual relationships much higher, and I like how it breaks down these relationships by the day, so you can see how they change over time. By default, Cloze identifies 25 key people as "the people you need to keep an eye on," which is based on the strength of your relationship with them across your various platforms. And this was where I felt Cloze stumbled a bit.

Cloze offers a terrific amount of detail on the people you contact most frequently.

It rated some folks as very high, simply because I was in contact with them frequently, but not because the quality of the correspondence was high. For example, the secretary at my children's school was listed as a key person for me. She emails often, as she is responsible for sending home all updates to the families at the school. But I rarely respond, and am not in contact with her on any social network, and while the messages she sends are valuable, I would not consider her a key contact.

Luckily, Cloze lets you add and remove contacts from this list of key people, and I like all of the details it offers on the folks you're in touch with. It rates not only the overall relationship with a contact, but also the frequency, dormancy, responsiveness, privacy, freshness, and balance that the relationship has—based on your online interactions, of course.

Cloze on the iPhone delivers a great experience for keeping up with messages and contacts.

It also shows you recent messages and related people, all of which would be very helpful to a businessperson looking to cultivate a relationship. But it can't measure the quality of your offline relationship, so if you're frequently texting, talking on the phone, or seeing each other in person, your relationship is likely much stronger than Cloze realizes.

Its mobile companion was far more useful for keeping up with my messages, though. Browsing your email on the small screen of an iPhone or with the less-than-perfect email client installed on the iPad can be frustrating, so I liked using Cloze's mobile app instead of default clients on my iOS devices.

Overall, I didn't find Cloze a true tool for eliminating email overload, especially when using the Web app. On iOS, Cloze made it easier to find messages and other correspondence from the folks I wanted to hear from, and offered plenty of options for browsing my messages. But on my desktop, I'll stick to my regular old email client for navigating my inbox, and will turn to Cloze only when I'm ready to take a look at where some of my key relationships stand.

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