It isn't unexpected at all, but Google has now decided that it will begin censoring searches so that people will no longer be able to use Google to find torrent sites and places that might be distributing pirated content. Under the new standard, takedown requests will be responded to within 24 hours and after that, searches will no longer show the sites that have been "taken down" from the results page.
This is problematic, of course, because Google is used by many people across the world. It seems to be a forgotten issue, but torrent websites can be used to download legal material and while torrent sites would never become particularly popular if they hosted only legal material, they do represent a platform for people who wish to distribute such content too.
It is problematic, moreover, that search engines seem to be held accountable to some degree, for search results they simply find. This seems to have become established since the website torrent-finder.com was among the seized website this week, even if it did not in any way host any illegal content, or even actual torrent files, on its platform.
More on the Google story here.
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