Search engine giant Google has recently announced changes to its search rankings in order to reduce the visibility of websites hosting pirated content.

Reportedly, Google has informed, “This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily – whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.”

Which means, that the Mountain View Valley company is trying to direct people who search for movies, TV shows, and music to sites like Hulu and Spotify, not torrent sites or data lockers like the infamous MegaUpload.

Analyst are suggesting that with this move, Google has market a direct grant to the movie and music industries, who have  long complained that Google facilitates piracy  — and the company needs to take some serious measures to get along with media companies as it tries to build an ecosystem around Google Play.

Relatively, in a blog post on Friday, Google said it was adding a new indicator to the more than 200 it uses to deliver the best possible search results: it will now take into account the number of valid copyright removal notices it receives for any given site. “Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results,” it said.

In the past, Google opened up a new copyright section in May in its Transparency Report – a publicly viewable online database showing statistics on its services.

Relatively according to Financial Times report, the current data suggests that it has received copyright removal requests for 4.3m web addresses over the past month – more than for the whole of 2009.

Well, this act is going to affect many other domains including your favorite torrent sites. One will have to wait and watch for the search results, after Google will modify the ranking system in the upcoming week.

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