The Pirate Bay reached a questionable milestone today when copyright holders asked Google to remove the three millionth Pirate Bay URL from search results. While most requests are valid, Google also removed several non-infringing pages.

Despite the criminal prosecution of The Pirate Bay four, the notorious torrent site remains available to the public at large.

TPB is setup to make it especially difficult for law enforcement to take it down, so copyright holders have to turn to third parties to address the threat.

One of the main strategies is to ask Google and other search engines to remove infringing Pirate Bay URLs from their search results.

Google in particular is heavily targeted and this week the number of thepiratebay.se URLs submitted to Google reached the three million mark. Nearly all of these links have indeed 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.

3 Million Pirate Bay URLs reported



While most of the reported links do indeed point to copyrighted material, some none-infringing pages have been removed as well.

Paramount Pictures, for example, asked to remove this blog post where a comment mentions “the beast of hercules,” not the Hercules movie. Similarly, TPB’s Doodles page is gone because an adult entertainment company confused it with Kelly Madison’s “Yankee Doodle Dame”

In total, the three million URLs were submitted in 135,486 separate takedown notices, averaging more than 22 links per takedown request. A staggering number, but one that pales in comparison to other sites.

Looking at the list of domains for which Google received the most URLs removal requests, The Pirate Bay is currently listed in 23rd place. The top spot goes to rapidgator.net with close to 13 million URLs, followed by 4shared.com, filestube.com, dilandau.eu and zippyshare.com. Torrentz.eu, the first torrent site in the list, comes in 8th with 5.4 million URLs.

For The Pirate Bay the reduced availability in Google is not much of a problem. Previously the Pirate Bay team informed TorrentFreak that they stopped relying on search engines as a traffic source a long time ago.

And indeed, despite the censored pages The Pirate Bay’s traffic has continued to grow. Even today the site remains among the 100 most visited websites on the Internet.