Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results
(torrentfreak.com)248 points by gslin 11 hours ago
248 points by gslin 11 hours ago
They’re… yes. Yes, that’s exactly what they have done and continue to do. Are you familiar with it?
It's not delisted. Anna's Archive is huge. The fact that Google participates in an entirely voluntary transparency log that gives you this information should illustrate to you where they stand on the issue of their needing to be compliant to the DMCA. It isn't clear to me why online communities constantly invent fan fiction of evil enemies when organizations merely comply with a reasonable interpretation of the law of the land they are incorporated in.
Apparently corpo doesn’t hesitate to remove it when it benefits consumer, because “we just follow the law, citizen!” But when it benefits corpo it takes decades of suing and multi-billion fines to make a change.
Totally not evil, just business, comrade, amirite?
no one, and i mean no one, has to invent the history of evil corporations doing evil things. Climate change? Cigarettes?, shit let's go modern. CZ? SBF?
if it's not clear to you may i suggest with the upmost respect that you read surveillance capitalism by zuboff (a successor to manufactured consent in my humble opinion).
I guess my question is where do you get the confidence or belief these companies are doing anything BUT evil? how many of americas biggest companies' workers need food aid from the govt? look up what % of army grunts are food insecure. in the heart of empire.
Where on earth do you get this faith in companies from?
Publicly traded corporations are machines whose only lawful purpose is to make money. They are legally obligated to be sociopathic systems. They aren't evil like an axe murderer, they're evil like a gasoline fire. They may be useful when properly controlled, but they're certainly never worth defending in the way you seem to feel the need to
>Publicly traded corporations are machines whose only lawful purpose is to make money.
Hey, so this isn't the case at all, publicly traded companies are under no lawful obligation to focus only on making money. Fiduciary duty does not mean this in any way. It's a common misconception whose perpetuation is harmful. Let's stop doing it.
Feels weird to say but I have found using Yandex of all places an excellent search engine for content that get taken down by DMCA requests.
Eg if you want to watch a movie that's not on Netflix using a web stream the search results are far better.
Feels like Google circa 2005.
I've been playing around with a variety of search engines such as Kagi, Startpage, Ecosia, DDG.
All of them are better than google in finding relevant results. Lol
Google is way too "personalized".
I switched to Kagi a while back and ended up buying their annual subscription for unlimited searches. It's such a breath of fresh air, like a search engine from an alternate universe where Google just focused on search instead of adtech.
Edit: after the 3rd page
Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/1436/united-st...
For fun what Gemini says: “The notion that Google explicitly admitted to "deprioritizing good results to sell more ads" is a common interpretation of these documents and expert testimony.”
> Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/1436/united-st...
That's a 230-page pdf. Do you have a more specific citation?
Doesn't https://www.google.com/search?q=your+search+query&ei=...&sta... give you page 3? Or at least, try jittering it a bit and compare to frontpage results.
> &start= parameter. This parameter controls which result number the page starts with. Google displays 10 results per page by default. For page 1, start=0 For page 2, start=10 For page 3, start=20
Google only ever returns a maximum of <400 results. If you actually click through at 100/page, you'll only get 3.something pages of results. Despite what is says at the top re: results. Those results are not accessible.
Bing only returns 900. Kagi only 200. Deep search and surfing is pretty much gone on all major search "engines".
> Google only ever returns a maximum of <400 results.
That's perfectly fine. If I'm going to use a search engine, I'm not willing to sift through hundreds of potentially relevant results. I hope I find what I'm searching for in the first page, or at best in the first 3 pages or so.
What's not cool about Google is that now it hits you with AI slop with dubious quality right at the top, followed by a page of sponsored results, followed by some potentially useful results, followed by an entire ocean of spam traps and clone sites and really shady results with exotic never-seen-before TLDs that leaves you wondering whether clicking on a link will get in a hostile database. That's what's not cool about Google: is that you can't use it to search the web anymore.
You can turn off personalization. (Operating under the assumption that most people search for facts, I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results.)
Location based personalization is pretty useful - if I search for 'Bob's Discount Linguine' I want the one in my neighborhood.
Lots of niche things (like programming) also reuse common english words to mean specific things - if I search e.g. 'locking' it's nice to get results related to asynchronous programming instead of locksmiths because google knows I regularly search for programming related terminology.
Of course it's questionable whether google does a good job at any of this, but I absolutely see the value.
I won't bother defending Google-style personalization as it exists for their search results, but since collisions in terminology across fields are common, it's not that hard to see how actual, thoughtful personalization could be useful. Someone searching for "Kafka" is going to want very different results based on whether they're thinking of software or literature. Opinions may also differ over the usefulness of sources, even for people ultimately interested primarily in facts; I find Kagi-style personalization (make your own domain list) very useful, but across Kagi's userbase Reddit is simultaneously one of the most lowered, most raised, and most pinned domains: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
> I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results.
The same short combination of words can mean very different things to different people. My favorite example of this is "C string" because when I was a kid learning C I was introduced to a whole new class of lingerie because Google didn't really personalize results back then. Now when I search "C string" Google knows exactly what I mean.
Some people search for shopping, or business details, in which case personalization can improve (or disimprove) result relevance based on knowing where you currently are, what day and time it is, what you tend to order etc. etc.
And some people search for songs/images/videos/books/articles.
For what it's worth, this is my first pro-Yandex comment after 17 years on Hacker News.
It's a major tech company service based in Russia, so presumably controlled by the government of Russia.
But the results produces for a query like "watch (obscure movie) online stream" are far better than what Google or Bing produces. If you need to check a scene of a specific episode of an obscure TV show, it's the fastest method (but happy to hear alternatives).
Also, the websites it links to aren't operated by the government of Russia.
Where I am, both yandex and Google are services from a foreign land.
I can't say about Yandex because I haven't used it much, but I have used Google and its services enough to know that it may appear neutral but its services do reflect politics of its origin country. For an outsider, I doubt Yandex is going to be any different than Google in those matters.
> Ah yes, using a Russian service, what could go wrong.
Nothing if you know what you're doing.
> Weekly Yandex astroturfers strike again.
People doing things you don't like doesn't mean they don't exist.
I am not exaggerating when i say i completely stopped using google for searches that google might take offence to. Serial numbers, business phone numbers, and of course books and papers all ho through real search engines. Currently, those are yandex as my main goto with brave as a backup.
I couldn't care less what google does because i don't use it.
Google does search now? I mean, it's great to see but I'm not sure how this is going to challenge the convenience of my chosen brand of chatbot being able to find the same info without being scammed by 100 seo optimised junk sites.
As much, yet. There’s still time and the OpenAI roadmap seems to promise ‘26 as the year.
Yeah they’re pretty terrible now. Reminds me, this is an interesting article about search engines getting worse and failing, but the author didn’t get into the spam aspect iirc: https://archive.org/details/search-timeline
Is there a good search engine which does not execute any JavaScripts on files that it scans? (This is not the same as excluding web pages that use JavaScripts (I have seen some search engines that do this); I still want to be able to search for them, but I do not want the search queries (or the summaries of the results) to include anything that is only displayed due to JavaScripts.)
No matter what my chosen brand of chatbot is, it can't help but hallucinate between 25% and 90% of the links it offers me. If it's not it's just proxying a google search for you itself.
Weird, I get pretty great results. Maybe I had hallucination rates like that 2 years ago, but not today.
1. Your chatbot doesn't have its own internet scale search index.
2. You're being given information that may or may not be coming in part from junk sites. All you've done is give up the agency to look at sources and decide for yourself which ones are legitimate.
I’m quite happy trading off the agency of wading through trash to an LLM. In fact, I would say that’s something they’re pretty good at.
Man I need to get around to downloading the z-archive torrents before annas archive is taken down. If I eliminate large PDFs and non english books I think I can fit it on two 32 TB drives with BTRFS z-std compression max setting. https://annas-archive.org/torrents
> eliminate large PDFs
How large? Isn't that going to result in an arbitrary filter of books? In other domains, large PDFs are due to PDF production errors, such as using color or needlessly high resolution, and not so much due to the volume of content - at least for text.
Let me know of those efforts, I wanna have an English/German/French backup of the archive, too. But as you said HDDs and filesystems are the problem, really.
Maybe I'll have to build a torrent splitter or something, because the UIs of all torrent clients are just not built for that.
Web searches like Google are great when searching for not exact terms, like synonyms for example. I have never encountered a website that has a search capability like that. Google finds the song "Million voices" by Otto Knows, from the search query "a a a a ah ah ah ah dance song".
Actually ~90%, but that does not include AI search (chatgpt et al).
Duckduckgo is bing, bing is Microsoft. I don't see how Microsoft is better than google at censorship.
Presumably, the home page doesn't contain any copyright violations. This is only DMCA stuff targetting individual links.
I was surprised that those pages showed up in book title searches at all. Makes sense to get rid of them, you don't want a search for a book to be topped by a link to pirate the book. The top-level domains still come up, and people who know they want to pirate a book can still find the site.
Are they in ChatGPT and other LLM providers? No need for Google.
I was more suggesting that I want my LLM provider to launder the IP so it avoids copyright law. The LLM provider is a fancy search engine where copyright does not apply to the results.
Anna's archive has already fulfilled G's needs (training Gemini) so now it's time to pretend it never existed ;)