[nickjj]

> If you can do this, so can Google. This just shows they refuse to.

If they immediately blocked these sites then Google would get a lot of flack for censoring the web.

I don't like these sites as much as anyone. A while back I even tweeted about[0] having a dream where I wrote a browser extension to intercept and redirect these copycat sites to the real site.

In my mind this falls into the same category as phone spam. The phone networks could block these but how would you feel if you knew your phone company was auto-filtering incoming calls without you having any control over that? It's a very thin line.

Hopefully one days algorithms will be smart enough to auto de-rank copycat sites or blatant plagiarism so they don't show up on the first page.

[0]: https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis/status/1473671136928018434

[colordrops]

They already de-rank plenty of sites for countless abuses, especially for gaming search. They have been doing this for a long time, and no one has ever called it censorship. This is the first time I've heard of anyone even suggesting this.

Also, their ranking algorithm is extremely complex. To suggest one complex algorithm is censorship and another is unbiased search results is to have a very naive understanding of how search works.

[Lascaille]

>algorithms will be smart enough to auto de-rank copycat sites or blatant plagiarism

So... if google creates an algorithm to detect copycatting/plagiarism it's okay for them to deploy it, but it's not okay if they do it by hand?

[nickjj]

> So... if google creates an algorithm to detect copycatting/plagiarism it's okay for them to deploy it, but it's not okay if they do it by hand?

No, I thought more about my comment a day later. I don't know what a fair answer is. Being ranked on page 216 by an algorithm or de-listed manually is basically the same outcome.