Google has decided to give lower search rankings to piracy sites, revealing that the company’s powerful search algorithm has been adjusted so that “sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.”

The company now counts a staggering amount of copyright notices. According to company records, Google received 4.4 million requests in the last 30 days to take down URLs for copyright violations (see chart above). If you want to learn more about book piracy, explore our posts on How To Fight Book Pirates and Why Readers Pirate eBooks and Writers Engage with eBook Pirates.

Here’s more about the new Google policy:  “Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed; Google cannot determine whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law. So while this new signal will influence the ranking of some search results, we won’t be removing any pages from search results unless we receive a valid copyright removal notice from the rights owner. And we’ll continue to provide “counter-notice” tools so that those who believe their content has been wrongly removed can get it reinstated. We’ll also continue to be transparent about copyright removals.” (Via Victoria Strauss)