November 4, 2025
749M zaps, zero chill
Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results
Internet shrugs: “We’ve moved on to chatbots and Yandex anyway”
TLDR: Google removed 749 million Anna’s Archive links, a huge slice of all takedowns ever, but the site still shows up by name. Commenters say Google search is irrelevant now—chatbots and even Yandex are better—while some joke Google trained on the library before hitting delete, spotlighting a shifting search game.
Google swung the biggest banhammer in book-land: 749 million Anna’s Archive links vaporized from search—about 5% of every copyright takedown Google’s ever done. Publishers like Penguin Random House and Wiley are firing off millions of removal requests weekly. Yet the site still shows if you type its name, and its mirror domains keep humming. Cue the comments section turning into a circus. One camp laughs at Google’s whack‑a‑mole: “I never used Google—Anna’s own search works fine,” says one reader. Another camp says search is passé: “Are they in ChatGPT? No need for Google,” quips a bot‑first crowd, who’d rather ask a chatbot than swim through SEO junk. The spiciest hot take? A wink‑wink conspiracy that Google already trained its AI (Gemini) on Anna’s Archive and is now pretending it never happened. And then there’s the curveball: Yandex fans claiming it’s the new old Google, serving up what DMCA scrubs from the Big G. Behind the drama, the numbers are wild—Google’s transparency report shows relentless takedowns, but discovery isn’t dead; it’s just shifting. The vibe: publishers play defense, Google plays cleanup, and the crowd’s moved on to chatbots, site‑native search, or, controversially, other engines. Internet culture, as always, refuses to be neatly deleted.
Key Points
- •Google confirmed removal of 749 million Anna’s Archive URLs from search following 784 million takedown requests.
- •Anna’s Archive accounts for about 5% of all alleged-infringing URLs ever reported to Google (15.1 billion since 2012).
- •The site launched in fall 2022 after the U.S. crackdown on Z-Library and remains operational despite legal actions and blocks.
- •Publishers, led by Penguin Random House and John Wiley & Sons, file ongoing DMCA notices, reporting ~10 million new URLs weekly.
- •Despite extensive delisting and demotions, searching the site’s name in Google still surfaces the main domain as the top result.