The search engine giant Google receives at least 100,000 pirate link removal requests every hour. While most are neglected, some are accepted and are taken down as requested. One of which was Mega.
Mega is a popular cloud storage service. Launched on January 19th, 2013, by Kim Dotcom, it has more than 50 million registered users in more than 245 countries, and more than 20 billion files have been uploaded.
Google has removed Mega from its search index, a result of an inaccurate takedown request from a movie company.
Mega became unfindable on Google. Users that were searching for Mega.nz on Google saw various Mega-related pages including its Wikipedia entry, but not its homepage. And in addition to those, they saw a mention at the bottom of the search page explaining that one result was removed in response to a DMCA request.
That was the Mega URL they were looking for.
And as a result, the service was experiencing a sudden decline in traffic.
The DMCA notice in question was sent by rivendell on behalf of Metropolitan and claims that the Mega.nz homepage linked to an infringing copy of the movie John Wick. While there wasn't any of the said infringing material linked on that page, the link was removed from Google's index.
According to Mega's Chairman Stephen Hall, this wasn't the first time for Mega to experience its homepage taken down.
"This has occurred three times in recent months. Each time we file a counter-notice, which is then acknowledged by Google within 2-3 days and the search results are then reinstated 10-14 days after that," Hall said. "The notices were filed by agents who are well aware of the DMCA process but clearly aren't verifying the links as their claimed content is certainly not available at mega.nz."
Google received millions of takedown requests each week, and it has been complying to requests in order to clean up its search index for years. But apparently, mistakes do happen. While in most cases the request claims are legitimate, but every now and then web pages are targeted mistakenly.
The mega.nz homepage was reinstated by the search engine on January 13th, or a day after the takedown happened.