The official Pirate Bay website hasn't served any torrents for more than a month. While many users of the site are desperately waiting for its return, Google has already picked a new winner. Those who search for "Pirate Bay" will be directed to one of its copycats. Bing meanwhile, rightfully tags thepiratebay.se as the official site.

Ever since The Pirate Bay was raided early December millions of people have been anticipating a comeback. In the meantime, they have had had no other option than to look for alternatives.

Several websites inspired by The Pirate Bay quickly appeared online, hoping to fill this gap. These include the OldPirateBay site that was launched by the operators of Isohunt.to.

While the site’s operators have nothing to do with The Pirate Bay, they cleverly use the brand to gain traffic. It’s been a successful strategy with the site now pulling in millions of visitors per day.

Interestingly, many of these visitors are being referred by Google where the OldPirateBay site has gained the top search spot . This is odd, to say the least, because the official Pirate Bay domain is still up and running.

For some reason Google’s algorithms have decided that the “copy,” which also indexes torrents from other torrent sites, is of more interest than the official site, which appears several results down.

While we have to agree that most torrent users will find OldPirateBay more useful, it doesn’t feel entirely right that Google can just crown a new Pirate Bay. In this instance, we prefer Bing’s strategy.

Those who use Microsoft’s search engine will still see thepiratebay.se listed as the top result. And to avoid any confusion, Bing clearly labels it as the “official site,” which it still is.

It appears that thepiratebay.se can only regain the top spot in Google if they start serving torrents again. Whether that will happen should become clear during the coming days when The Pirate Bay crew is expected to make an official statement.