Back in May when Google started publishing the takedown requests it received from copyright holders, the number was fairly high, roughly 250,000 a week. That’s as much as all of 2009. Now, it’s even higher. As of this month, that number has reached 2.5 million.
The numbers come with a new transparency feature Google has rolled out which allows anyone to download a big ol’ list of all copyright removals in the Transparency Report, the data being refreshed every day. On top of that, Google is also telling how many of those requests it finds legitimate, and while some of the errors are glaring, the lion’s share of requests — around 97.5 per cent — are generally found to be valid and the results removed.
Even with that insane volume, Google has been able to keep up quite well so far. Most of the requests are processed in about six hours, which is a pretty good turn-around on such massive numbers. As time goes on that number is bound to only get bigger, maybe even by more than one order of magnitude at a time. Hopefully the rate of error doesn’t get worse as a result. [Google Policy By The Numbers via Boing Boing]