Since the start of the year, Google has received and complied with over 100 million requests to remove allegedly copyright infringing webpages from their search results. This mammoth amount of takedowns is already more than the amount for the entirety of 2012, and Google is processing an average of 15 million requests per month.

TorrentFreak has crunched the numbers for every week this year, using Google's Transparency Report that details all takedown requests, and found that Google has been asked to remove 105,300,000 links to "infringing" webpages, and they have complied with the vast majority. 5.8 million of these requests were to remove links to FilesTube, 2.5 million to remove Torrentz links and 2.2 million to remove Rapidgator links.

Well known torrenting website The Pirate Bay wasn't featured in the top 20, and that's due to a combination of domain name changes and how the site only indexes around two million magnet links. Most users will likely head directly to The Pirate Bay to perform searches anyway as it's such a high-profile destination for piracy.

Unsurprisingly, the number one group asking for DMCA takedowns is the RIAA, requesting over 26 million URLs to be removed. Even though Google responds to requests swiftly, the RIAA is hoping for entire domains to be banned from the search engine as it believes individual URL removals aren't very effective. "Every day produces more results and there is no end in sight. We are using a bucket to deal with an ocean of illegal downloading", Brad Buckles, an RIAA executive vice president stated.

Despite Google's compliance with a huge amount of takedown requests, the company is still concerned about the amount of takedowns that occur in error, which TorrentFreak claims are in the thousands. The company says that they continue "to put substantial resources into improving and streamlining this process, including into identifying erroneous and abusive takedowns, and deterring abuse".