Over the last year, search engine Google received millions of formal requests to sever links to copyrighted material.
According to data gathered by online privacy and copyright news provider TorrentFreak, the more than 350 million bids for links to be removed from the firm’s search index in 2014 constituted a new record.
This is also a huge leap in requests, seeing as in 2008, the total number for the year was only 68 bids.
The statistics were collated by TorrentFreak by analysing Google’s weekly reports, as the search company does not give an overall yearly figure. After breaking the data down, it was found that the largest number of requests actually came from an organisation in the UK.
The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), which acts as a trade body for the UK’s music industry, requested that over 60 million links to copyrighted material be removed by Google. With the bids submitted by copyright holders more often than not upheld, it is a good way to assist in the reputation management of websites.
Apart from the BPI, only three other sites were found to have requested removals for over five million links, with all of them being filesharing platforms.
Along with such actions, Google itself has also made a number of changes to its search algorithms in recent times to penalise websites that host copyrighted material and duplications. This helps to emphasise the importance for online news providers to only post fresh, organic content.
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