During 2014, copyright holders all around the globe stepped on the gas when it came to sending DMCA notices to Google. Today we take a look at the top 10 domains Google has been asked to delist from search in the past 12 months. Perhaps surprisingly they don't include a single torrent site.

As 2014 draws to a close it is notable that despite dozens of sites being blocked around Europe and millions of infringement notices going out to US-based Internet users, piracy appears to be just as prolific as it ever was.

There appears to be very little copyright holders can do to stop their content appearing online and as a result countless millions of ‘infringing’ URLs become indexed by the world’s leading search engines.

Once this happens it’s largely too late to do anything really significant to turn back the clock on availability. Nevertheless, entertainment companies still want to make life as difficult as possible for online pirates. As a result they send out millions of takedown notices, not only to sites hosting content, but also to search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

These companies are remarkably quick to respond. Google, for example, processes most DMCA notices in a matter of hours, despite receiving one million requests per day and on one occasion 11.6 million takedowns in a week.

Every single one of these takedowns is logged in the company’s Transparency Report which has become a valuable source of insight into the company’s responses to copyright and the wider picture online.

Listed below are the top 10 domains for which Google received the most notices during the past year (Dec 28, 2013 to Dec 29, 2014).

File-hosting and MP3 search engines dominate the list, so it comes as little surprise that the major record labels (under the BPI umbrella) sent the most notices during the course of the year.

It’s also noteworthy that despite the high-profiles of sites such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, those sites were relegated to 18th and 29th places respectively in the takedown charts. In fact not a single torrent site made the top 10 this year, with the nearest torrent-related domains being torrentz.pro (#11), torrenthound (#12) and come.in (#13).

Finally, it’s worth noting that there is a site for which Google receives millions of notices but isn’t listed in any of its reports. It’s possible we’ll never know the numbers involved, but YouTube itself is likely to be in the official top 10.