[DaBear]

10:10 | Thursday January 27, 2011
By Eamonn Forde
After announcing plans in December to take a tougher stance on pirate sites, Google has started to implement its policies.

Key to its olive branch to the content industries was the fact that it would remove contentious terms like ?torrent? and ?P2P? from the autocomplete functionality within its search bar.

TorrentFreak reports that this policy is now being implemented and says that companies such as RapidShare and Megaupload are also having their names removed from autocomplete.

Even typing their name directly into the search box does not trigger autocomplete so users will have to write them out in full. Users can, of course, still access these sits via Google as the company wants to avoid getting into a censorship situation.

It is believed that these moves by Google are clearing the way for its long-rumours cloud-based music service that could launch this year.