Google reportedly blocks 749 million Anna’s Archive URLs

Have you ever heard of Anna’s Archive? No? Well, then, that’s good news for copyright holders. They don’t want you to know about Anna’s Archive, and they’re making sure Google helps keep it that way.

Google has taken down a whopping 749 million links to Anna’s Archive from its search engine, according to the company’s own transparency report, and as first reported by copyright and digital rights outlet TorrentFreak.

The 749 million confirmed URL removals is actually slightly lower than the 784 million link removal requests that Google received. According to TorrentFreak, those denied requests were mostly due to Google not actually indexing the requested URL in its search engine in the first place.

What is Anna’s Archive?

Anna’s Archive is an open-source search engine for “shadow libraries,” or online libraries made up of usually paid or paywalled content that’s been pirated and uploaded for free. It’s basically a Pirate Bay, but for books and other literary material.

The takedown requests are mostly from copyright holders, like book publisher Penguin Random House. However, more than 1,000 different publishers and even authors themselves have submitted takedown requests to Google for Anna’s Archive links.

The Anna’s Archive platform itself is just a search engine. It does not host any of the pirated material. It simply helps users find material elsewhere on the internet.

In fact, Anna’s Archive and the three domain names the platform lives on — annas-archive.se, annas-archive.org, and annas-archive.li — are the top three most-targeted URLs for Google takedown requests from copyright holders, Torrent Freak reported.

As TorrentFreak points out, Anna’s Archive makes up a whopping 5 percent of all 15.1 billion takedown requests to Google since the search giant first started publishing its transparency report in May 2012. 

The sheer number of takedown requests targeting Anna’s Archive is even more incredible when you consider that the platform only launched in the fall of 2022.

While copyright holders would like to keep Anna’s Archive out of Google search, its likely that internet users will soon become much more familiar with the platform. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, for example, was recently found to be using pirated content discovered through platforms like Anna’s Archive to train the company’s AI models.

As a legal battle plays out over AI training, fair use, and copyright law, Anna’s Archive will no doubt find itself in a much brighter spotlight.