The request-for-removal metric is a new one, appearing in the latest version of the released Thursday.

According to the report, Google received requests from some 2400 copyright owners and reporting organizations to purge from search results more than 1.2 million links contained on 24,374 domains.

On average, Google says that it removes from its search results of the links that rights holders or their representatives request be purged from the results.

Top copyright-owning link-killers during March, Google reports, were Microsoft, which asked that more than half a million (546,716) URLs be sanitized from search results; NBC Universal (165,662); BPI -- British Recorded Music Industry -- (151,087); porn site Elegant Angel (41,803); and the RIAA (31,922).

Top targets of the link purgers were filestube.com, with 41,307 contested links; torrentz.eu (22,551); 4shared.com (20,158); torrentreactor.net (18,856); and zippyshare.com (18,844).