One of the interesting things about cleaning up your life, both in the external world and the internal, is that you may gain an insight into something unexpected. For example, transactions.
Successful transactions are where the customer gets what he paid for. As long as that trust is maintained, things are cool. I pay PG&E, they keep the lights on. So the inclusion of known piracy sites in the search engine indices is a problem, not just in the ethical aspect of ripping off other people’s work, but also that it undermines basic fundamental tenets of trade. Either you have law or you don’t.
Imagine a world where you can walk into one supermarket and pay for your groceries and another supermarket located right next to it that has nothing but stolen inventory from the first supermarket where you can just take your groceries and walk out the door. That scenario would never fly, yet that’s a microcosm of the search engine internet today. Legit businesses and illegitimate businesses are all in the same index. You search for a movie and up comes legit places like Amazon where you can buy it, but also right along with it are other sites where you can just download a pirated copy for free. The search engines could do a lot more to reduce the visibility of pirate sites but oddly enough, they don’t. Why? I think it’s simply a matter of money. As far as they’re concerned, traffic is traffic. The more sites the better. They monetize both, so why would they give up a income stream when it’s not in their best interest?