After the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Google and other search engines must take requests for search results to be deleted in what has become known as the “right to be forgotten,” Google immediately received 12,000 requests. That was before Google launched a tool for people to actually make requests.

Late last week, the company did release one, and the number of requests has predictably skyrocketed. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that requests are actually averaging about 10,000 per day, and that Google said on Tuesday that it had already received 41,000 requests.

Google doesn’t have to honor all requests. It just has to take them into consideration. Still, that’s a lot of consideration. The average daily number of requests will likely decrease significantly as time goes on. The whole thing is new, and is making a lot of headlines, so of course the number is going to be huge right now, but either way, there is clearly massive interest in it, and Google will likely have its hands full for a long time.

As the Journal notes, the 10,000 a day breaks down to about seven per minute. They should add that to the Internet in Real-Time graphic. That’s actually down significantly from the day after Google launched the request tool, when it was more like 20 requests per minute.

The Journal has sources that say Google may have to hire new staffers or redirect internal resources to handle all of the requests. At the current rate, that seems like a given.

At least the tool only applies to a select group of countries, though it’s not exactly a small group. Should this tool become available to more parts of the world, Google is going to really have its work cut out for it.

You can read more about how the tool works here.

Image via Google