FilesTube Search Engine First to Smash 10 Million DMCA Notice Barrier

Google’s popularity means that it is one of the first places users turn to when they’re trying to find content online. That also includes unauthorized content, and as a result Google receives endless notices from copyright holders to remove infringing URLs from its listings.

Even as a content-less search engine, Google is held responsible for everyone else’s infringing behavior, but they’re not on their own. Specialist search engines that focus on indexing content on other sites are also subjected to takedowns, but in the last couple of years the trend has been to hit Google’s index of those sites’ links too.

One such site is FilesTube, a search engine dedicated to indexing content found on the biggest file-hosting sites with public sharing capabilities such as Rapidgator, 4Shared and Uploaded. These sites host large quantities of unauthorized content uploaded by their users, so FilesTube has become popular with those looking for TV shows, movies, music, apps and just about any other content one can imagine.

FilesTube, a site founded back in 2007, reportedly responds to DMCA notices, but Google nevertheless gets hammered with requests from copyright holders to de-list FilesTube URLs.

“During the last year Google disabled access to 389,512 FilesTube links,” we wrote in May 2012 when FilesTube first topped the takedown charts. The situation today has developed out of all proportion.

This week, Google received its 10 millionth takedown notice for FilesTube, the vast majority of them received in the last calender year. During the past four months there hasn’t been a week with fewer than 130,000 takedowns and at times as many as 460,000 were issued.

From Torrent Freak