Suggestion: make a few microsites with 'bingo card creator torrents' and such to crowd these guys off the front page, then have a nice blurb up on the page where you explain the downsides of not having an official copy and your stellar support.

That way you might mitigate some of the damage these jerks do to your bottom line.

Not worth even the hour of my time it would take, or I would have done it four years ago. (Ironically, using minisites to get ten slots on a SERP is bad to Google's view of the world in a way that serialz are not.)

It is just the psychic nuisance factor: every time I see that box it's like "Come on guys, really?"

You probably haven't investigated, but I'm wondering if any of those are actually what they claim to be, or more likely just malware payloads. It's quite common for the black hats to shotgun-distribute a malware trojan labeled as a crack or serial for thousands or millions of software titles.

(I am resolved to only ever get burned by that once...)

How about getting some help from bloggers? Incentives for them to write about not pirating your software?

Sounds like the esteemed director of search quality at google has his work cut out for him.

I consider this a valid challenge of making a profitable software business. You shouldn't need to rely on Google hiding results (or litigation) to sell more licenses. Your customers should want to buy it and if they don't - you have failed.

Removing 'bingo card creater torrent' from suggestions given to people typing 'bingo card creater' seems fairly reasonable to me, for the reasons patio11 outlined.

What is weird is that they don't autocomplete 'bitto' to 'bittorrent'. I mean, at that point they already know what they're searching for, why not continue to expedite them?

It appears to return similar results right now. I've always been frustrated when I would search for software, and the entire first page results, besides the actual first result, were rapidshare and megaupload aggregating blogs.

The query of the title of the Pragmatic Bookshelf book that happens to be open on my desk returns 4 relevant links. The remaining 6 are sites advertising free PDF downloads. Back in the day, one would have to go to a dedicated search engine for these links.

As much as I dislike "Censoring", Google should decide whether it wants to be in the business of providing links to sites that clearly are aggregators for filesharing and fileuploading links to pirated and copyrighted content. The Pirate Bay, et al., can take care of that.

While I agree it's distasteful, a good percentage of Google's search users are surely looking for exactly that link to illegal copies though? By providing those links quickly and easily Google is arguably improving the quality of the search results for its end users.

Now, I'm with you that I'd rather that the search results were worse in this specific way, but this sort of thing is surely a direct result of algorithmically optimising search results to present the user with what they're after even if they don't necessarily know exactly how to find it, a general good and a defeating of the sort of SEO techniques we usually complain about here.

In general though - Google already has a 'SafeSearch' function for images, which seems to work tolerably well without complaint. Perhaps a similar system could be introduced both for results and suggestions so that these to illegal content and sites they consider likely to harm my computer could be filtered out by default and only returned if I specifically set the preference or search terms to look for them?

The business of providing links? They're hosting most of those blogs!

You should try the Duck Duck Go challenge. I don't see torrents in my search results unless I choose !torrent of course.