

You don’t just search for something online, you “Google It,” that’s really how most of us refer to the most widely used search engine in the world. Naturally, the company has a huge responsibility on its hands to ensure that it doesn’t rank links that point to pirated content. Google is quick to act on DMCA takedown notices where copyright holders have made a legitimate request and according to a new report, the company took down 900 million pirate links in 2016 alone.

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It’s an astonishing figure. Google removed 900 million links to pirated content in the previous year. This figure is an increase of almost 100 percent when compared to 2015.

Google continues to tweak its search engine to ensure that visitors get the results that are most relevant and that pirate sites don’t benefit off of content that they don’t own.

Copyright holders are vigilant as ever, it’s not like them to waste a second in sending a DMCA takedown notice, and they have every right to do so. In 2016, rightsholders asked Google to remove more than one billion links that allegedly pointed to pirated content.

The company’s own transparency report reveals that it complied with 89.8 percent of the requests which means that 914 million pirate links were removed. The report also shows that Google removes around 20 million such links on a weekly basis.

It’s expected that these figures might level off somewhat in 2017 but since today is the very first day of the new year, we still have a way to go before we can see whether or not that’s going to happen.

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