Copyright owners asked Google to take down more than 345 million links from its search results last year, up from just 62 requests back in 2008, reports TorrentFreak.
Google shares weekly reports of all the takedown requests it receives, and those numbers for all of 2014 added up to 345,169,134, which means that the search giant had to process over a million reported links per day.
While most of these requests result in the links being taken off Google’s search results, the company sometimes takes ‘no action’ if the links don’t seem to actually infringe any copyrights.
File sharing services 4shared.com, Rapidgator.com and Uploaded.net are the most common targets with over five million takedown requests on each domain. The largest number of complaints came from UK music industry group BPI, with over 60 million takedown requests last year.
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Numerous organizations have asked Google to take a harder stance on sites that host copyright-infringing material over the years, in addition to honoring takedown requests. The company responded by adjusting its search algorithms to downrank such sites. The latest update to address ‘pirate’ content rolled out last October.
➤ Google Asked To Remove 345 Million “Pirate” Links In 2014 [TorrentFreak]
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