Google is dealing with over twice as many piracy takedown requests compared to this time last year — over 2 million per day according to TorrentFreak.
If you do the math, this equates to roughly 1500 requests every minute. As recently as 2011, Google was only getting a few hundred requests throughout the course of an entire day.
Over the past month alone, TorrentFreak reports that Google received takedown requests from 5,609 copyright holders targeting 65 million links across 68,484 domains.
Google is usually quick to respond to these requests, but even the world’s largest search engine has difficulty handling such a large volume of requests.
In an effort to reduce the prevalence of pirated content in search results, Google released a piracy-oriented algorithm update last year.
While that update made some of the larger torrent sites less visible, the biggest culprit is now illegal streaming sites. Google is facing pressure from industry groups like the MPAA and RIAA to de-index the worst offenders completely, but the search giant says site-wide censorship is going too far.
As Google and copyright holders continues to butt heads on what should and should not be included in search results, the number of piracy requests per day is only expected to keep rising.
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