In May, Google announced that its public transparency report would start including requests from various parties to remove website URLs from its search results. At that time, Google was getting about 1.2 million URL removal requests a month.
While Google has not yet offered up its own official year-end numbers, TorrentFreak has gone back and done some number crunching on its own. They claim that so far for 2012, Google has received requests to remove 51,395,353 URLs from its search results.
The numbers also show that the amount of requests has continued its upward spiral. As you can see in the chart above, those numbers began to go way up around May. The article states that last week, Google received requests to remove a whopping 3,502,345 URLs from its results. That number is 15 times the amount the company got per week at the beginning of the year.
It"s not a surprise to learn that the Recording Industry Association of America is the number one source for these requests. Google"s numbers show that in 2012, they were responsible for 7,816,766 URL takedown requests. The file hosting search engine website FilesTube was the one that got the most takedown requests in the past year, with 2,273,280 separate URLs targeted.
Source: TorrentFreak | Image via TorrentFreak