Microsoft Bing has removed 143 million links from its index

Microsoft is quite active when it comes to rights holder complaints. The number of links removed from the search engine index each year now runs into the hundreds of millions. The search engine Bing, which has been maintained and developed by the Redmond company for many years, has basically never been able to achieve a significant market share.

But that doesn’t mean the various content industries are ignoring the service. As a result, Microsoft also regularly receives letters from the affected companies and law firms requesting the removal of various URLs behind which content has allegedly been made available illegally. The scale of complaints is significant and would not be manageable from all sides if most were not processed by automated systems. Because of how loud TorrentFreak Microsoft’s transparency report shows that the number of links removed last year was nearly 143 million.

Active Against Complaints

The number of requests was only slightly higher at 144 million, meaning almost all requests were fulfilled. According to Microsoft, more than 99 percent of the complaints were understandable and well-founded according to their own checks. Last year, a three-digit million had already been removed from links, but at 125 million it was slightly lower. It’s interesting to see a clear imbalance between the first and second half of the year.

In the first six months of 2021, 103 million takedown requests were sent to Redmond, compared to 41 million. This is probably mainly due to the fact that with “Remove Your Media” an important player in this field has disappeared. The company mainly hunted for rights violations by various manga publishers, criticizing 50 million links in the first half of 2021, down from 46,000 in the second half of the year.