Google is accepting "prophylactic" takedown requests to keep pirated content out of its Search results, an anonymous reader writes, citing a TorrentFreak report. From the article: Over the past year, we've noticed on a few occasions that Google is processing takedown notices for non-indexed links. While we assumed that this was an 'error' on the sender's part, it appears to be a new policy. "Google has critically expanded notice and takedown in another important way: We accept notices for URLs that are not even in our index in the first place. That way, we can collect information even about pages and domains we have not yet crawled," Caleb Donaldson, copyright counsel at Google writes. In other words, Google blocks URLs before they appear in the search results, as some sort of piracy vaccine. "We process these URLs as we do the others. Once one of these not-in-index URLs is approved for takedown, we prophylactically block it from appearing in our Search results, and we take all the additional deterrent measures listed above." Some submitters are heavily relying on the new feature, Google found. In some cases, the majority of the submitted URLs in a notice are not indexed yet.

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