Google gets significantly more removal requests after changing search algorithm

Google received significantly more removal requests in the week of October 20. At the time, the company received no fewer than 11.7 million requests. Recently, Google announced that it would place sites lower in the search results if they receive a lot of removal requests.

The number of 11.7 million requests is almost three quarters higher than the number of two weeks earlier, when the company received ‘only’ 6.7 million requests. This is according to Google’s transparency report. A week before the sudden outlier, the number of removal requests had already risen to almost 8 million.

TorrentFreak, noting the sudden increase, notes that the increase follows Google’s implementation of a new search algorithm. This algorithm results in sites that receive a lot of removal requests, which are lowered in the search results. This means that copyright holders now have an extra motivation to submit many removal requests.

In recent years, the number of removal requests has grown significantly. In mid-2011, that number was still around 70,000 per week. A year later there were already more than one and a half million per month; in 2013 around five million.