An update to our search algorithms
Found on Google Inside Search on Friday, 10 August 2012
Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.
In fact, we’re now receiving and processing more copyright removal notices every day than we did in all of 2009—more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone.
Yeah, I can see no way in which this could go wrong. Just watch the news and you'll stumble over invalid DMCA notices which are issued to fight competitors or to execute a form of censorship. There's really something wrong with the whole business that has grown around the topic of copyrights when over the last three years, removal notices have grown by a factor of at least 365. Oh and I am sure that Google will happily kick Youtube off the search results since that page receives tons of valid DMCA takedown requests every single day.