TorrentFreak reports Google has removed The Pirate Bay from showing up in Google’s search suggestions within Google Instant Search.

Google Instant Search will auto-complete the search phrase based on search popularity and other factors. Prior to today, Google would auto-complete for the domain thepiratebay but now, Google has added that to their piracy filter list.

In January 2011, Google removed many piracy related searches from showing up in Instant Search. They included the popular piracy sites and terms “torrent,” “BitTorrent” and others. Today, The Pirate Bay made the list of piracy related terms that Google has decided to filter.

Back in October 2009, there was a weird glitch that removed pirate bay’s home page from Google. That was soon restored after the glitch was fixed.

To be clear, in this case, Google does list the site in the search results. Google just does not show the name or domain name as an auto-complete in Google Instant.

A Pirate Bay spokesperson told TorrentFreak that they are not in the least bit hurt by Google’s “half-baked” attempts to keep people away from their site. They haven’t noticed a decrease in referrers from Google, and even if that was the case it wouldn’t be a problem as only a tiny percentage of The Pirate Bay’s traffic comes from search engines.

A Google spokesperson said, “While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online.”