Google asked to take down over a million websites

PanARMENIAN.Net - It's no secret that online pirates have plenty of websites to choose from. This is also exemplified by a new milestone just reached by Google. As Torrent Freak reports citing the search engine, rightsholders have asked the company to remove content from a million different sites. The targets include some unusual suspects, including The White House, NASA, and the New York Times.

Removing search results is nothing new for Google. The company has been cleaning up its search index for years, in response to complaints from copyright holders.

Every week the search engine processes millions of requests targeting a wide range of websites that allegedly offer infringing content.

The process is fairly transparent as Google publishes all notices in a daily report. This allows us to keep track of the often staggering numbers, and today there’s a new milestone to report.

Since Google started counting, the company has now received takedown notices for a staggering one million websites. It’s not the number of URLs that were reported in total, as these run in the billions, but the separate domain names that were called out.

Statistics show that a large proportion of the targeted sites have only been flagged a few dozen times or less. Many of these were called out by mistake, including some high profile ones.

The White House, for example, is not your typical pirate site and neither is the U.S. Department of Justice. Still, both sites have been repeatedly reported to Google. The same is true for other big names such as NASA, Netflix, the BBC, and the New York Times.