Disney has won the patent for a piracy-free search engine and is looking to build a search engine model which ranks pages according to legitimacy and authenticity.
Disney already has its own search engine which links to its own products. The new patent is the result of Disney shareholders reportedly becoming increasingly discontented with the action Google has taken on tackling piracy.
The new patent is titled “Online content ranking system based on authenticity metric values for web elements”, with the main goal of the new search engine being the prevention of illegal sites from ranking in search results.
Web users would be unable to see to sites which host illegal torrents like The Pirate Bay and Torrentz.eu.
Official Disney products to rank higher
For example, when searching for ‘Sleeping Beauty’, the official Disney page currently ranks below both Wikipedia and IMBD.
What this essentially means is that if you were to search for ‘Sleeping Beauty’, the new search engine would only return officially licensed content and would hide illegally pirated material.
Is enough being done to tackle piracy?
This news comes at a similar time to the release of the latest Google update, which is also geared towards fighting online piracy.
The update to Google’s 2012 DMCA algorithm makes it harder for web users to find illegal movie or music files, removing websites which were previously unaffected by the initial update.
However, the fact that Disney is publicly exploring the idea of releasing their own search engine could signal that they don’t think enough is currently being done.
There is no news as to whether Disney wishes to fully develop and publicly release their new engine, or sell it to Google or Microsoft.