Redesign of Google’s search formula last year has so far failed to live up to its promise to discourage consumers visiting sites illegal music, an industry group said.

A report released this week by the Recording Industry Association of America said it is the Google initiative announced in August to “demote” sites accused of piracy seemed to have little or no effect.

“We have found no evidence that Google’s policy has had a demonstrable impact on downgrading sites with large amounts of piracy,” said the report released Wednesday RIAA.

“These sites consistently appear at the top of Google search results for popular songs or artists.”

The RIAA said it analyzed “counterfeiters series” identified in the report author Google transparency “were not significantly downgraded in search results and even managed to appear on the first page of results Search more than 98 percent of the time in research. ‘

He added that questionable sites “constantly appeared in three to five of the top 10 search results.”

“We recognize and appreciate that Google has taken positive steps to address links to illegal music on its network,” said RIAA General Counsel Steven Marks.

“Unfortunately, our initial analysis concludes that, so far, Google pledged six months ago to demote pirate sites remain a dead letter. Popular music research continue to yield results that focus on illegal sites to the detriment of legitimate services, which are often relegated to the pages. And Google auto complete function continues to lead users to a lot of these illicit sites. ‘

In response to the RIAA, a spokesman for Google said: “We have invested heavily in tools for copyright owners and content removal process notes faster than ever.”

Google said last month that “we have received more than 14 million requests for withdrawal of copyright Google, quickly remove more than 97 percent of search results.”

Last August, Google said it was tweaking its search formula to give a higher priority to legal content and flow classification for sites affected by piracy, complaints about illegal copies of music, movies and other content.

More than 200 “signals” are included in Google’s algorithm secret research to determine what is a priority on the search results pages.

[Image Via CNN]