More than half of people who wound up looking at copyright-infringing content used search terms that suggested innocent intent

Hollywood’s trade body has lambasted Google and other search engine providers for doing too little to prevent people finding pirated content online.

In a report published on Wednesday, the Motion Picture Association of America says that 58% of the search queries people used before viewing copyright-infringing content "contain generic of title-specific keywords only" - suggesting that they weren't necessarily looking to find illegal content when they began a search.

That would mean that rather than searching for a phrase that would imply a search for illicit content, such as "Breaking Bad torrent" or "Star Trek Into Darkness free download", people just entered the name of the TV series or film and were served up links to illicit content.

The report, “Understanding the Role of Search in Online Piracy”, says search engines remain a major method by which users access pirated content: 74% of those surveyed by the association admitted to using a search engine for either discovery of pirated content, or for navigating around what the MPAA calls “domains with infringing content”.

However the report also shows that only 20% of visits to infringing URLs comes via search engines, while 35.4% comes from "linking" sites, and 40.5% is given just as "other".

Google has always maintained that it cannot be held responsible for users' decisions to access pirated content such as films and TV shows. But the MPAA says the report's main finding indicates that "consumers who may not explicitly intend to watch the content illegally ultimately do so online."

The report is the latest salvo in a long-running battle between the MPAA, search engines, and illicit content providers. As long ago as 2004 the MPAA claimed that a quarter of internet users had downloaded a film illegally at least once - although it limited its figures to broadband users, a far smaller number then.

The MPAA also charges Google’s anti-piracy methods with being ineffective, writing that the company’s plan to “demote” the search ranking of sites which support piracy, enacted in August 2012, actually left referrals to those sites flat.

“Search engines bear responsibility for introducing people to infringing content - even people who aren’t actively looking for it”, said Chris Dodd, the chairman of the MPAA who is also a US senator. “The television and movie community is working every day to develop new and innovative ways to watch content online, and as the internet’s gatekeepers, search engines share a responsibility to play a constructive role in not directing audiences to illegitimate content.”

But Michael Beckerman, president and chief executive of the Internet Association, hit back at the MPAA, saying it was "blaming the internet and technology for its problems". He said: "In reality, the internet is empowering content creators and consumers to access more lawful content than ever before.

"In fact, I would argue that the internet provides a massive opportunity for creators to reach consumers and build their audience," Beckerman continued. "MPAA fought the VCR years ago and that technology ended up being a boon to their industry. We'll see the same story repeat with the Internet."

Google declined to comment for this story, but in an anti-piracy report released just last week, the company laid out exactly how it decides to demote and remove infringing sites.

“While we use the number of valid copyright removal notices as a signal for ranking purposes,” it writes, “we do not remove pages from results unless we receive a specific removal request for the page. Even for the websites that have received the highest numbers of notices, the number of noticed pages is typically only a tiny fraction of the total number of pages on the site. It would be inappropriate to remove entire sites under these circumstances.”