Without any official announcement, Google has made a new movement towards fighting content piracy. The auto complete function, i.e. the feature that proposes guessed choices while you type your query, does not anymore propose some proposals that may be related to piracy. For instance, when typing “Black Swan T”, it does not anymore propose Black Swan Torrent. Nevertheless, the filtering is not consistent. “Black Swan S” proposes “Black Swan Streaming” as seventh choice. When I type “pi”, I’m still proposed as second choice “Pirate bay”! TorrentFreak has analysed more in details the strategy of filtering. This new filtering does only impact the auto-completion, and not the query, i.e. “Black Swan torrent” gives links to torrents.

Obviously, this is one additional goodwill towards content owners. This is part of a larger strategy (see Google acquires Widevine)

Will it have any impact for users? No! It is just theater security as good will for studios.