Google and The Pirate Bay have had an interesting relationship over the years, to say the least. This week, users pointed out that The Pirate Bay can appear significantly lower down in search results (and definitely not on the first page), depending on which country you are searching in. We reached out to Google, which denied the allegations that it was demoting the site.

TorrentFreak first spotted the odd behavior. The publication used Chrome in incognito mode to search for “The Pirate Bay” in Google with different IP addresses to see where the site’s thepiratebay.org domain showed up. An IP address in the U.K., for example, would result in The Pirate Bay showing up on the fifth or sixth page, while an IP address in the U.S. would bring back The Pirate Bay as the top result.

“Google hasn’t done anything to purposely demote The Pirate Bay for searches on its name in the named countries,” a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat. “A site’s ranking on Google Search is determined using hundreds of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query, including things like the specific words that appear on websites, the freshness of content, your region, and PageRank.”

In short, Google says it isn’t specifically targeting The Pirate Bay. That said, the company has updated its search algorithms in the past to punish pirate sites across the board.

If you try to reproduce this yourself, your mileage will likely vary depending on your location. A VentureBeat staff member in France, for example, confirmed that The Pirate Bay did not appear for her as the top result:

This isn’t the first time Google users have noticed odd search results when trying to find The Pirate Bay. Back in September 2012, for example, The Pirate Bay stopped showing up in Google’s Instant and Autocomplete search engine features.

Multiple times last year, Google’s Safe Browsing service blocked The Pirate Bay in Chrome, Firefox, and various Google services. But those blocks were temporary, likely due to malicious ads found on some pages.

In related news, Google on Friday announced it will no longer use country code domains to localize search results. Instead, Google Search now uses your location to show you local results, though you can still change your country service in the search engine’s settings.

It’s possible the two stories are related. We’ve asked Google whether this is a coincidence or not and will update you if we hear back.

Update on October 29: Google confirmed the two are unrelated.