Pirated movies cost the industry more than $12 billion a year, while pirated music in Australia costs approximately $1.3 billion.
Content providers have criticised search engines for leading users to popular piracy websites, but Google is taking measures to curb illegal downloads.
Google says it will list legal websites such as Spotify at the top of the search results, but these sites will have to pay for prime positioning.
Online piracy takes a huge toll on artists and their bottom line, according to University of Technology Sydney Professor Michael Fraser,
“You can't expect them to maintain sustainable creative professionalism creative industries when you don't pay,” he said.
Critics have slammed the measures, saying Google's changes won't deter people who routinely pirate digital content.
The measures comes after music trade group BPI made more than 43 million requests for Google to remove search results throughout 2013.
The US group, the RIAA, made 31.6 million requests over the same period.
According to a Google report into piracy, the search engine has removed 222 million results from searches because of copyright infringement.
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