Google Removes Over One Million Pages Per Month

ComputerWorld reporter Jaikumar Vijayan reports that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is complaining that "Google Piracy Policies Are Lacking." Quoting Vijayan:

• According to Google, Microsoft or its representatives have asked Google to remove more than 2.5 million URLs, or a median of 48,700 URLs per week, from its search engine results since July 2011.
• The next highest requester was NBC Universal, which asked Google to remove about 1 million URLs over the same period.
• The RIAA requested that some 416,000 URLs be blocked during that time.
• In all, a total of about 2,400 copyright owners have put in URL removal requests covering about more than 24,300 domains since last July.
• Google noted than it complied with 97% of takedown requests at an average response time of 10 hours or less.

Vijayan notes that the RIAA uses statistics from Google's Tranparency Report listing copyright removal requests. The report lists the major requesting agencies and offending Web domains.

Google also maintains reports on governmental requests for user data, which includes statistics on Google's compliance rate for each nation, and statistics on the number and timing of Google traffic from each major nation.

-DD