GOOGLE HAS DECIDED TO CENSORATE AFTER MILLIONS OF WARNINGS

Hello dear readers of Hacker's Station, today we will talk about the latest complaints that Google has applied.

Google has planted a new milestone. In recent years, copyright holders have asked the search engine to remove the URLs of three million unique domains. These include blatant pirated sites such as YTS.mx and Fmovies.to, but also several unusual and innocent targets including Netflix, the BBC and even the official White House website.

In recent years, copyright holders have asked Google to remove billions of links to alleged pirated content. At one point, the search engine processed nearly three million links per day. A stunning number to say the least.

This number has slowly decreased in recent years. That is partly due to Google's active policy of making pirated sites less visible in its search results.

GOOGLE: 3 MILLION DOMAIN NAMES REPORTED

Let's start with the most targeted domain name, which is 4shared.com. The file-hosting service was once one of the largest websites on the Internet. While its popularity has declined in recent years, its track record remains clearly visible in Google's transparency report.

Since 2011, over 5,400 copyright holders have reported 68,348,390 links to 4shared.com that "violate" links to Google. The vast majority of these, 91%, were actually removed from the search results.

This makes 4shared the absolute king of the takedown. The site is followed at a distance by mp3toys.xyz, rapidgator.net, chomikuj.pl, uploaded.net, which have been reported between 27 million and 52 million times. These are still "respectable" numbers, of course.

MDB AND DISCOG

Two of the most frequently targeted legitimate sites are IMDb and Discogs. Both sites have an elaborate database of information on entertainment content, both video and audio. This seems to be quite confusing for some copyright holders. In recent years, Google has been asked to remove 5,077 IMDB links and 8,198 URLs from Discogs. All of these requests have been rightly denied.

COPYRIGHT HOLDERS ADDRESS THEMSELVES

Interestingly, copyright holders have also flagged their websites as piracy portals. HBO famously posted a takedown notice for HBO.com, which was targeted 28 times in total. Virtually all major copyright holders have targeted their sites, including Disney.com, Netflix.com, Warnerbros.com, and many more.

The weirdest errors we've seen aren't actually about a domain, but an IP address. In recent years, several companies have reported 127.0.0.1, which indicates localhost, which means that the reporter is reporting their own network.

News sites are also often labeled as copyright infringements. We can search for any news site at random and there is a good chance it has been reported.

MILLIONS OF ERRORS

Government organizations are not immune to removal requests either. If we zoom in on the United States, we see that the sites of the FBI, the Department of Justice and the Senate have all been targeted. The White House is also not safe, as it has been called more than a dozen times.

While many mistakes come from the rights holders, we must say that the takedown system is regularly abused even by imposters. These tend to report many URLs even from legitimate domains.

All in all, it can be said that, on the surface, the milestone of three million reported domains only shows part of the picture. On the one hand, it is a small group of well-known pirate sites and there are also the pirate sites that hide under the names of the most famous and common ones, but if a site is blocked, another 10 identical ones appear. However, there are many other sites that are not worth mentioning.

That's all, see you in a future article.