According to Google Senior Copyright Counsel Fred von Lohman, requests for URL purges have been snowballing. "These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009," he in a company blog.

While requests for URL purges have increased, so has Google's response time to those requests, according to von Lohman. Through the use of , the company has pared its average processing time for an URL purge request to 11 hours.

He also emphasizes that Google makes efforts to evaluate the validity of infringements claimed by rights holders before sanitizing links in search results.

"[W]e recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper’s review of a TV show," he writes. "The requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations of the show, even though there was no infringing content."