Google has published another transparency report, and thanks to the detailed removal requests info, it’s actually a decent index of pirated content on the web.
You want something from Microsoft? Sort the report by their requests, viola, a list of offending sites that Microsoft has verified as having options to download copyrighted content.
It’s like an all you can eat buffet for people who don’t know where to find warez!
In fact the report, warez aside, has all sorts of neat statistics for the curious among us to poke at:
- Interactive traffic viewer for Google services broken down by Country
- Top 5 report of Requests for Organizations, Owners, and Domains
- Somewhat comical list of requests from Government bodies (Oh Canada!)
- And user requests for content removal, including compliance stats.
It’s a pretty honest bit of transparency that is very informative and handy. If you didn’t know who the top sites are in terms of pirated content, this is a great resource.
Google News – More options?
To be frank, it’s another slow news day for SEO happenings, but it prompted me to hit news.google.com with my desktop browser for a change.
Since I’m logged into a Google account on my desktop machine the Google News page loaded up a preferences panel on the left hand sidebar which I’d never known about because I use my phone for browsing Google News (usually all about world headlines if you’re not logged in).
With these options you can:
- Choose how much of each type
- Remove news types
- Add news types (ie: Women’s Sports)
- Add/Remove Sources
- And more..
Personally, I was quite impressed by this as Google seems to really want to handle the customization and learn from your habits, vs. letting you tell them exactly what to show you.
I suppose in the long run this is a lot less of a control and more of a suggestion, like how Google bot reads a canonical tag. 
If you don’t use Google for News, perhaps you aught to go take a look at what they have been working on?
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 1:56 pm
