Piracy news site TorrentFreak reports that Google removed 75 percent more URLs in 2014 than it did the previous year.

Google doesn't tally up annual totals, but it does release weekly reports on DMCA notices, and TorrentFreak took it upon itself to add up the weekly reports. Most of the takedown requests are honored. Google has a longstanding tradition of supplying DMCA takedown notices to Chilling Effects, a website that archives such requests.

Just a few years back, the number of takedown requests could be measured in the dozens, not the millions. In 2008, Google handled 62 DMCA takedown requests, and, in that year, each request was over just one copyrighted work. In later years, DMCA notices came to ask for millions of URLs to be removed to protect multiple works.

The big explosion came between 2010 and 2012. For instance, in 2010, the RIAA and NBCUniversal filed no notices, while Microsoft asked for 72 URLs to be removed. In 2012, RIAA sought to take down 7.63 million URLs, Microsoft asked for 6.06 million removals, and NBCUniversal asked for 2.17 million.

The first week of December 2011, Google processed 238,450 URLs with alleged copyright violations. In the first week of December 2014, it processed 9.1 million removal requests. That's more than 38 times as many.

UK music industry group BPI was the top link-killer, clocking in at 60 million reported links. The most-targeted sites were 4shared.com, rapidgator.net, and uploaded.net, with more than 5 million removal requests apiece.