Google has been publishing Transparency Reports for some time now,detailing things like government requests to remove content from search results or requests for users’ information to be removed. From today you can see the number of removal requests it receives from companies over copyright and piracy concerns. “Each request names specific URLs to be removed, and we list the domain portions of URLs requested to be removed under targeted domains.”
So far over 1,246,713 URLs have been requested to be removed and over 24,129 domains, since 2011.
Microsoft has asked Google to remove more than 500,000 links from its index in the last month, figures show. The vast majority of the links in question were ones which took people to sites connecting to pirated Microsoft software.
The British Phonographic Institute, which represents record labels, asked for most links, 160,000, to be removed.
In July 2011, the point at which its statistics start, Google was getting requests to remove 129,063 links per week. In May 2012 this figure had risen to 284,850. In the past month, more than 1.2 million links on 24,000 separate sites were removed. Requests to de-list links came from 1,296 separate copyright holders.
Google said it granted about 97% of requests to remove links and it usually took about 11 hours for any request to have an effect on search results.
Read more: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/
