Disney Wins Patent For Search Engine Free Of Piracy

Hot on the heels of Google's recent changes to reduce the appearance of torrent and piracy sites in search results comes news that Disney has obtained a patent for a search engine that is free of pirated content. Not just filtering out piracy from search results, Disney's patent focuses on promoting "authentic" sites, such as those of copyright and trademark holders, that are related to search terms.

Disney is far from the first media company to be unhappy with Google results including links to sites where users can download content for free. While it isn't clear at this point what plans Disney has to act on their patent, this is a fairly big step for the company. The patent is titled "Online content ranking system based on authenticity metric values for web elements," and works through "the filtering of undesirable search results, such as results referencing piracy websites."

Instead of basing a site's importance on its "popularity," as most search giants do now, Disney's search engine will give users sites with authenticity. However, this means that all decisions on what is authentic or not will be up to Disney. In their own example they say that if a user were to search for "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," the Disney.go.com website would be ranked at the top, even above Wikipedia and IMDb entries for the movie.

While there are many times when it makes sense for an official site to be the top result for a brand or property, it wouldn't exactly be ideal when users are looking for general information or news and reviews about something like a movie. Disney does already have their own internal search engine, which only links to their own sites and properties, but maybe with this patent they're considering opening the search to the rest of the net, as long as all the results are on the up and up.

SOURCE TorrentFreak