Microsoft's take-down link requests still reside in Bing

Google said on Thursday that in the last month, 1,296 copyright owners submitted almost 1.25 million take-down requests targeting more than 24,000 websites. Almost half of the pirated copyrighted material found on those sites belonged to Microsoft. Naturally it is assumed that Microsoft’s takedown requests also affect its own search engine, Bing. Apparently not. Users of Google's new copyright transparency tool are discovering that the links in Microsoft requests to be yanked out of Google's search engine -- those the company claim to pirated software and other illegal content -- still reside in Bing. A perfect example is a link to a page on TorrentRoom that lists a pirated copy of the Xbox 360 game Dirt 2. Google's results didn't pull up the infringing page, but Microsoft's Bing did. There are several possibilities for the differences between the two search engines. As Softpedia suggests, Microsoft may be issuing the same take-down notice to both Google and Bing, but the latter is taking longer to remove the link from its index. Google reportedly takes less than 11 hours to review the request and remove the link -- after all, it manages over one million takedowns per month. Given that Microsoft is a bit newer in the search engine market, it may simply take longer. It's also possible that Bing never received the same requests as Google, or that Microsoft believes Bing is currently too small and inconsequential for it to be worth issuing an automated takedown notice. Of course, there's the silly notion that Microsoft is leaving links in its Bing search engine on purpose to make money from the sites. Others believe it's all about connecting users to its pirated software on its own turf. At this point, there could be numerous reasons as to why pirate links still remain in Bing, but honestly when you really think about it, these offending links should already be removed from Bing long before Google gets a request just on principle alone. To some degree, Google's transparency tool not only makes the search engine giant look good and responsible, but seemingly calls out its rival. "The goal of the transparency report is to help users understand what we remove from search and why," Google senior copyright counsel Fred von Lohmann said on Thursday. "We remove more search results for copyright reasons than for any other reason."