The scale is ever increasing: Google is currently processing about one million removal requests per day. This number comes from an upward trend with copyright owners who report more and more potentially infringing search results, trying to deter piracy.

The number of requests has increased dramatically when Google started to disclose information to the public. Just a couple years ago Google received only a few dozen takedown notices per year, while now the search giant processes millions of “infringing” links every week. These days, for the first time ever, the company has processed over 1 million URLs per day.

Google was asked to take down over 7.8 million search results last week, which is up 10% compared to the week before. It can be said that Google is now asked to remove an infringing search result every 8 milliseconds, and 6 years ago it had to address just one request per 6 days.

Of course, this rising trend leads to controversy. It has been reported that some requests do not concern any copyrighted content, due to mistakes or abuse. As a result, links to legitimate material are also deleted. Although the company tries to catch these errors, it is impossible to manually review a million links per day, so some search results are still removed in error.

The search giant claims that it is doing its best to satisfy the copyright owners. Back in 2013, the company even published a report explaining what anti-piracy measures it uses. However, the entertainment industry believes that the search giant can and should do more.

For example, the Recording Industry Association of America sees the staggering amount of takedown requests as the confirmation of the notion that the process is not really effective. According to the RIAA executive vice president of anti-piracy, Google could ban entire domains from its search results instead of just removing the links.

This alarming trend has also attracted the interest of the American lawmakers. For example, earlier in 2014 the House Judiciary Subcommittee has reviewed the DMCA takedown issue, where both rights owners, ISPs and other parties were examining what they can do in order to optimize the process. At the same time, the number of removal requests will continue to rise – Google expects 10 million requests per week soon.