Google will start adjusting search results so that websites accused of copyright infringement appear further down in the list. In a blog post Google on Friday the Search Engine behemoth announced the potentially drastic change in its search engine which will start to take affect next week.

As Google’s senior vice president of search, Amit Singhal, eloborated in the blog post “Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.”

Singhal added that the change will actually “help users” in the sense that now, searches for digital media like TV and music will be more likely to pull up “legitimate, quality sources of content” — that is, websites that are unquestionably lawful — such as streaming video and music websites.

Google reportedly got  more than 4.3 million copyright removal requests in the past month, a whooping 97 percent of which are valid. Not surprisingly, many of the domains that are targets of the most requests are file-sharing and torrent sites. Those sites would presumably appear lower in Google search rankings and therefore be harder to find because of Google’s changes, which start next week.