Google was a busy little bee last week. Another of the things it announced was a new Government Requests tool, which shows information about requests for user data or content removal from government agencies worldwide. (This is for Google and YouTube.) This iteration shows data from July through December of 2009, and there are plans to add data in six-month increments. The tool is available at http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/.

The site is basically a map with two menus. You can see government requests for data, and you can see requests for content removal. Brazil tops the list both times, not what I would have expected. There were many, many more requests for data than there were for content removal.

Countries with some data associated with them are tagged with numbers. Click on a country’s number and you’ll get a window showing how many requests were made for data and content removal. You’ll also see what percentage of data removal requests were complied with, and what kind of removal requests they were. A lot of Brazil’s were court orders. I wonder why South Korea had so many AdWords removal requests?

I want more context. I know Brazil has a lot of requests, but how many Brazil pages are in Google’s index? (using site:br as the measuring stick.) 193 million, approximately, at this writing. So that’s .66 content removal requests per million pages of indexed, country-code-specific content in Google’s index. Meanwhile, #2 Germany has 626 million pages (approximately at this writing) which means, what, .30 content removal requests per million pages of indexed, country-code-specific content in Google’s index? Pardon me while I math out for a while…