Copyright holders have asked Google to remove two million Pirate Bay URLs from its search results. According to Google this means that between one and five percent of all Pirate Bay links are no longer discoverable in its search engine.

In an effort to make it difficult for the public to find pirated content, copyright holders send millions of takedown notices to Google every week.

One of the top domains listed in these notices is thepiratebay.se. Since the notorious torrent site doesn’t accept takedown requests itself, copyright holders have to turn to Google to do something about the appearance of their work on the infamous torrent site.

This week the number of thepiratebay.se URLs submitted to Google reached the two million mark. Nearly all of these links have been removed and can no longer be accessed through search results.

The chart below shows the number of links that have been submitted per week. There is a sharp decline towards the end of 2013 when The Pirate Bay used another domain name. The requests increased again in December when the torrent site switched back.

In total, the two million URLs were submitted in 93,070 separate takedown notices, averaging more than 20 links per takedown request. A staggering number, but one that pales in comparison to other sites.

Looking at the list of domains that received the most URLs removal requests, The Pirate Bay ends up in 29th place. The top spot goes to filestube.com with more than 11 million URLs, followed by dilandau.eu, rapidgator.net, zippyshare.com and 4shared.com.Torrentz.eu, the first torrent site in the list, comes in 8th with 4.4 million URLs.

The million dollar question is of course whether all these takedown requests have had a significant impact on the availability of pirated content.

According to Google, the two million URLs represent between one and five percent of all links that are indexed, so it’s safe to say that there’s still plenty of Pirate Bay content available via Google. Similarly, removing the search results doesn’t hinder people from going to the notorious torrent site directly.

The Pirate Bay itself isn’t particularly concerned about this development. The site’s traffic has increased steadily over the past few years, and so has the number of files being uploaded to the site.

In common with the many ISP blockades of The Pirate Bay, it’s safe to conclude that people can find plenty of alternative routes to end up where they want to be…