Earlier this week, Google released their annual Transparency Report, which, among other things, focuses on the multitude of search engine result takedown requests they receive. Among the information contained within, there’s a list of the entities issuing these requests. The far and away leader of this group is a company called Marketly, and if you look at their list of requests, you’ll see that Microsoft is an important client of theirs.
Considering Microsoft’s massive size, it makes sense for them to outsource this kind of work. Going after infringement via search engine results is surely a tedious job, the kind such delegation was made for. That’s all fine and good. The rub, however, comes when a takedown request is issued to Google, but the same result remains in the Bing search index.
Mind you, Google heeded the request and removed the search result in question.
With that in mind, when the company issuing the takedown request still has the result in its own search index, it comes off as negligent, incompetent, or hypocritical. The question is, which one applies to Microsoft Bing? The reason this question comes up is due to a discovery made by TechDirt, which finds the following takedown request for an Xbox game called DiRT 2 from a site called TorrentRoom.com. The URL in question is as follows:
http://www.torrentroom.com/torrent/3664273-DiRT-2-XBOX-360-RF.html
When a search is conducted in each engine, you’ll find the link has been removed from Google–the Chilling Effects report indicating as much–but, as of this post, it still remains in Bing:
Or maybe Marketly could point this out to their clients, allowing Microsoft to remove the very result it’s asking Google to remove. Whatever the case, if you’re going to ask other search engines to get rid of content that infringes on your brand, perhaps you should check to make sure your search results are up to par, as well.