Disney Patents a Piracy Free Search Engine

[Ernesto]

Disney and other rightsholders are not happy with today’s search engines after repeatedly asking Google and Co. to promote legal content and remove pirate sites from search results.

While Google implemented several changes to satisfy these requests, Disney has also taken matters into its own hands.

A new patent awarded to Disney Enterprises this week describes a search engine through which pirated content is hard to find.

Titled “Online content ranking system based on authenticity metric values for web elements,” one of the patent’s main goals is to prevent pirated movies and other illicit content from ranking well in the search results.

According to Disney their patent makes it possible to “enable the filtering of undesirable search results, such as results referencing piracy websites.”

Disney believes that current search engines are using the wrong approach as they rely on a website’s “popularity.” This allows site owners to game the system in order to rank higher.

“For example, a manipulated page for unauthorized sales of drugs, movies, etc. might be able to obtain a high popularity rating, but what the typical user will want to see is a more authentic page,” they explain.

While this is a rather simplified description of the complex algorithms most search engines use, Disney believes it can do a better job.

In their patent they describe a system that re-ranks search results based on an “authenticity index”. This works twofold, by promoting sites that are more “authoritative” and filtering out undesirable content.



“In particular, embodiments enable more authoritative search results … to be ranked higher and be more visible to a user. Embodiments furthermore enable the filtering of undesirable search results, such as results referencing piracy websites, child pornography websites, and/or the like,” Disney writes.

While Disney’s idea of a search engine may sound appealing to some, deciding what counts as “authoritative” is still rather subjective. Google, for example, uses PageRank which is in part based on the number of quality links to websites.

Disney, however, suggests giving “official” sites priority when certain terms relate to a property of a company. These “authority” weights can include trademarks, copyrighted material, and domain name information.

This doesn’t only affect pirated content, Disney explains, it also means that a Wikipedia entry or IMDb listing for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” will rank lower than the official Disney page of the film.

“The Disney.go.com web page may be associated with an authenticity weight that is greater than the authenticity weight associated with the encyclopedia web page because Disney.go.com is the official domain for The Walt Disney Company. As such, with respect to the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs™ film, the Disney.go.com web page may be considered more authoritative (and thus more authentic) than the encyclopedia web page,” Disney writes.

In other words, official sites should be the top result for “brand” related searches, even if people are looking for background info or more balanced (re)views. For pirate sites there’s no place at all in the top results, even though Disney’s definition of a pirate site may also be rather subjective.

It’s unclear whether Disney has any plans to implement the patent in the wild. The company currently has a search engine but this only includes links to its own properties.

Disney search

Originally Published: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 14:59:03 +0000
source

[stormium]

i can see it now... you'll be searching for 'six flags' and disney search replies with, 'did you mean disney land?'

based on that screen shot, their current search engine is nothing more than a promotional gimic that does little more than sells disney crap... and any search engine they make will just be an expansion of such.

[NIK]

I'm genuinely flummoxed by the strategy here.

Essentially, it's a whitelist-based search engine (as opposed to googles blacklist-based search engine). Nothing difficult to wrap your head around technology-wise. But...why patent it?

First thought would be "to prove that it is possible to do what google has claimed is impossible--filter pirate results out entirely"

But the problem is that backfires on Disney regardless of whether it succeeds OR fails.

If they were ever to deploy a such a search engine, in competition against google, it would fail and fail hard because...well, if you can't work that out there is no hope for you.

So, they would only succeed in proving that google was right and they were wrong.

But, if by some miracle, it succeeded, they [Disney] would hold the patent to it...meaning google (or any other seach engine) wouldn't be able to switch to it even if they really really wanted to, unless they also wanted to fork over really really large amounts of money to Disney for the use of the copyrighted technology, which...they just won't.

So I cannot see what Disney can possibly even imagine they might gain out of it.

[ViperScale]

Wait a min, shouldn't you get ice and stuff as the first item when you search for frozen?

[AtomTPB]

Wait a min, shouldn't you get ice and stuff as the first item when you search for frozen?

I was wondering the same.
So, Is it just a "Disney-related" search engine ?

[stormium]

Wait a min, shouldn't you get ice and stuff as the first item when you search for frozen?

I was wondering the same.
So, Is it just a "Disney-related" search engine ?

first post.

The company currently has a search engine but this only includes links to its own properties.

“The Disney.go.com web page may be associated with an authenticity weight that is greater than the authenticity weight associated with the encyclopedia web page because Disney.go.com is the official domain for The Walt Disney Company. As such, with respect to the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs™ film, the Disney.go.com web page may be considered more authoritative (and thus more authentic) than the encyclopedia web page,” Disney writes.

In other words, official sites should be the top result for “brand” related searches, even if people are looking for background info or more balanced (re)views. For pirate sites there’s no place at all in the top results, even though Disney’s definition of a pirate site may also be rather subjective.

[ddoking007]

I don't know if I should laugh or cry at this.... I read the while I was on vacation last week....

if this does work then.. they will have a problem of not only competing in the movie and retail industry but also have

• fork out the bandwidth to handle billions of users
  
• hiring an ENTIRE Building of workers
  
• building to house the servers
  
• staff to keep them running
  
• land for them (will be marked up because of the name)
  
• climate controlled room
  
• Staff that KNOWS HOW TO FUCKING CODE
  
• 24 hour on call tech support for those coders if they run into trouble
  

am I missing anything oh ya I am

• make sure you don't get your ass sued for copyright violations from other copyright trolls
  
• make sure PORN doesn't end up on your search results on a company that promotes FAMILY ENTERTAINMENT.
  
• keep virus filled links from popping up
  
• and make sure it stays profitable for you
  

now am I missing anything.. that GOOGLE does besides DMCA takedowns...

[stormium]

...so long as it is medium to softcore porn, disney would stand to make a substantial profit by leaving it listed.

disney is a fairly diverse company when it comes to entertainment, service and hospitality... it kinda makes sense that they would want to make their own search engine that could promote their products more... effectively.

[ddoking007]

ya but when was the last time you see any disney backed porn ever and I mean on any site that isn't a image site...

[NIK]

TorrentFreak is often guilty of poor reporting but in this case you guys are guilty of poor reading.