When we Google "carly rae jepsen call me maybe mp3," the top hit is a site called mp3skull.com, which provides several links to copies of Jepsen's catchy pop song for download. And that, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) argues in a new report, is a big problem.

Last summer, Google announced that it would add a new criteria to its search rankings: the number of takedown requests. The more takedown requests a site has, the lower it would be in the rankings.

At least that was the idea. But the RIAA's research suggests that the new policy hasn't had any detectable effect on the rankings of major pirate sites. The RIAA has been tracking the rankings of pirate sites in Google search results for queries like "rihanna diamonds download" and "kesha die young mp3," and it has found that the sites with the most takedown notices have continued to consistently appear on the first page of results. Indeed, they were more likely to appear than links to legitimate music-purchase sites such as iTunes or Amazon.

Because Google publishes statistics on takedown requests, the trade group was able to determine which sites are targeted most frequently. mp3skull, for example, has been the target of 153,326 takedown requests between August and December of last year. Another site called downloads.nl has received a whopping 433,342 takedown requests.

Yet the RIAA's statistics suggest that if Google is taking takedowns into account in its search results, it's not having much effect:

To be clear, the law doesn't require Google to demote pirate sites in its rankings. As long as Google complies with the DMCA's notice-and-takedown regime, it's in the clear legally. The decision to demote pirate sites was Google's effort to go beyond the letter of the law in order to address the concerns of major copyright holders.

Still, Google did promise to demote pirate sites in its rankings last summer. And the RIAA's data suggests that the search giant hasn't done much to deliver on that promise.

Update: A Google spokeswoman responds: "We have invested heavily in copyright tools for content owners and process takedown notices faster than ever. In the last month we received more than 14 million copyright removal requests for Google Search, quickly removing more than 97% from search results. In addition, Google’s growing partnerships and distribution deals with the content industry benefit both creators and users, and generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the industry each year."