This is a slight increase in a takedown when compared to the same period last year. Bing noted that over 99% of the takedown requests were legit, and thus removed. And interestingly, all the removals in Bing have affected the results of other search engines relying on Bing.
Bing 2021 Transparency Report
Though Microsoft’s Bing is a small player in the search engine market, it still holds a strong position in a few areas like the US and Europe. Unlike Google, Bing processes millions of requests every day and complies with takedown requests sent by copyright owners. In this pursuit, Bing removed nearly 143 million “pirate” URLs from its search results in 2021, as noted in its transparency report released this week. The search engine said they had received over 144 million DMCA requests last year, where about 99% of them (142,855,667 URLs) were considered legit, and thus removed. Most of the requests were filed by Remove Your Media, an entity that works with various Manga copyright houses around the world. Remove Your Media sent over 50 million takedown requests to Bing in the first half of 2021, but dropped this to a mere 46,000 requests in the second half. Yet, it stands as the No.1 removal requestor, followed by UK’s music group BPI (31 million URL requests) and Marketly (11 million URL requests). The total number of 143 million takedown requests is a slightly increased count from last year’s 125 million URLs. In the category of most reported domains, we see Mangapark.net, a manga-related site at the top with 2.5 million times targets. This was followed by Mangafox and Ninemanga, similar domains hosting copyrighted manga content. What’s interesting is that Bing removing these results has affected the other search engine results too! Search engines like the DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Qwant, and Ecosia, which rely on Bing’s results had these changes reflected in their results automatically.
