YouTube escapes Google's piracy site smackdown

"We’re treating YouTube like any other site in search rankings," a Google spokesbot told Search Engine Land - then adding rather tellingly: "That said, we don’t expect this change to demote results for popular user-generated content sites."

Google paid $1.65bn for YouTube knowing that its success was based on infringement, not user-contributed videos of cats or toddlers, emails subsequently showed. (See Google knew YouTube did evil, but bought it anyway, March 2010.)