Google has successfully removed 1.75 billion websites from its index due to copyright infringements as per the requests lodged by the owners of the websites, said a statement issued by the company.
According to Google, around 40 million takedown requests were rejected, which is 2.1 percent of the total requests lodged. Moreover, another 16 million requests were duplicates.
The official statement from Google blog post read,
“Google may temporarily or permanently remove sites from its index and search results if it believes it is obligated to do so by law, if the sites do not meet Google’s quality guidelines, or for other reasons, such as if the sites detract from users’ ability to locate relevant information.
We cannot comment on the individual reasons a page may be removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in removal from our index.”
Google takes no action on its own unless the owner of the copyrighted content makes an official request. Once the request is sent, Google processes the request and take actions accordingly. If the website in question is violating Google’s guidelines, the URL is removed from the search results. All the owners of the URLs in question are notified via Search Console.
The owners of the banned websites can login to the Search Console, add their website URL and verify the site ownership which will again be processed by Google.
The number of submitted requests has reached 20 million which has led to the removal of 1.75 billion URLs belonging to 888 thousand domains.
China’s Baidu search here I come :).
If something doesn’t come up in Google’s search results, if simply doesn’t exist for the vast majority of Internet users. They literally hold the keys to the Internet, and this is to much power to be concentrated in one mega-corp or one country’s jurisdiction.