For several years now, Google has been counting the number of complaints from copyright holders about domain names that are used by websites that violate intellectual property rights. Copyright holders demand the removal of links to these resources from the search results. The other day, Google celebrated a kind of anniversary: the number of unique domain names about which complaints were received reached 5 million. Moreover, the total number of URLs mentioned in complaints has already exceeded 7.5 billion.
According to Torrent Freak, at one point Google was receiving complaints about nearly 3 million URLs a day. Today, thanks to active measures to combat intellectual piracy, this number has noticeably decreased. In addition, the frightening figure of 5 million unique domains also does not indicate thriving piracy. First of all, you need to understand that many pirate sites are forced to constantly change domain names - precisely because their domains are quickly blocked. Therefore, the huge number of domains associated with piracy speaks not so much of a huge amount of pirated resources, but of an active fight against piracy.
Another important point is that a significant proportion of complaints are from a relatively small number of domains belonging to the largest copyright infringers. Thus, about 750 million URLs that received complaints (that is, 10% of the total) are associated with only 20 domain names.
And finally, it must be said that many complaints, although included in the general statistics, are simply erroneous, since the domain names mentioned in them have nothing to do with piracy. This, for example, often happens with online dictionary domains that use intellectual property terms as examples of usage. Leading information resources, such as The New York Times or the BBC, also regularly classify such complaints as “pirates.” 259 complaints were sent to the URLs of the Netflix streaming service. And it's really funny that Google has received requests 775,454 times to remove URLs for its own Google.com domain from its search listings.
