Google removes 749 million links to Anna's Archive-related content in three years

According to TorrentFreak, the well-known “shadow library” website Anna’s Archive has become a key target of copyright owners’ crackdowns. In just three years, publishers and authors have pushed Google to remove as many as 749 million links to Anna’s Archive pages from its search results. This move accounts for 5% of all copyright complaint reporting links that Google has received since 2012. Despite this, the site itself remains easily accessible through the search engine.

Anna’s Archive, as a shadow library metasearch engine, has been online since Z-Library was criminally cracked down by the United States in the fall of 2022, aiming to continue to open “free” books and documents to the public. In the past three years, Anna’s Archive has been blocked in many countries, was sued by the United States for crawling the WorldCat database, and actively provides library training assistance to artificial intelligence researchers.

Despite legal pressure, Anna’s Archive and its associated .li and .se domain names are still operating normally, causing headaches for many publishers. Unable to directly attack the website, copyright owners turn to third parties such as Google for assistance.

In Google’s removal of infringing links, The Pirate Bay has been a key target in the past few years. More than 4.2 million links from its main domain have been removed, but there is still a gap compared with Anna’s Archive. Google’s transparency report shows that copyright owners reported a total of 784 million links to the three major Ana’s Archive domain names, and 749 million links were ultimately confirmed to be removed.

Compared with websites such as The Pirate Bay, Anna’s Archive has more pages and different country domain names, so the number of links that can be reported for removal is larger. On the Google platform, the scale of reporting and removal of its three major domain names has far exceeded that of other similar websites.

Since Google released its first transparency report in 2012, a total of 15.1 billion suspected infringing links have been reported, of which Anna’s Archive accounts for 5%. Not only Penguin Random House and John Wiley & Sons participated in the report, but also more than 1,000 authors or publishing organizations.

At present, the copyright owner still reports about 10 million new links every week, trying to make it difficult for the public to search the resources of the website through Google. The actual effect is that many links have indeed been removed from the shelves, and some book search results have been demoted. However, as long as Anna’s Archive website name is searched directly, its homepage still remains at the top of Google.