I know this hardly constitutes a groundbreaking study, but in the last year I've detected an uptick in the number of searches coming to my website looking for pirated books. It's not because I'm writing more about piracy issues — the search terms are different from words of mine.
So far I've noticed three different types:
- Mysterious links from Bit Torrent sites (Pirate Bay et al)
- Searches for [book name] followed by a word linked to illegal downloads: bit torrent, rapidshare, free online copy, etc.
- Hail Mary's to Google: "illegal ebooks" "free ebooks"
Since I don't have any illegal books to download, or even significant excerpts, I'm a bit confused as to the logic of this. Of course, maybe I'm a tiny bit glad that they're having a hard time finding illegal files.
If Google searches (no, not the blundering Bing) are mis-directing would-be pirates to my site, I can only imagine how many hits legitimate piracy sites (oxymoron intended) are receiving.
