Google has been served with more than 70 orders to remove online content by New Zealand's government and courts, the tech giant's transparency report reveals.

The requests, for which in-depth data has been kept by the Silicon Valley-based company since 2009, have come for a myriad of reasons, including, privacy and security, defamation, copyright infringements, impersonations and harassment.

The report, examined by the Herald after its latest update at the end of May, shows 73 requests for removal have been made since 2009.

A total of 290 individual online items were listed as part of those requests.

Worldwide, 35,786 removal requests were made by governments to the Californian business last year - a large rise from the less than 2000 requests at the start of the decade.

The figures come after the Herald and The Times of London reported Google's uneasy relationship with the courts, suppressed material, and its willingness to follow judicial orders to remove content.

In the latest recorded six month period, from July last year to December, seven New Zealand requests were made for removal for defamation, one for harassment, and one for copyright.

Of those requests, seven came from the judiciary and two from the Government.

In the six months prior, until the end of June last year, five requests were made from the Government to remove content from Google web searches and YouTube, which is owned by Google.

In 2016, seven requests were made - four from the courts and three from the Government.

Those requests included 119 pieces of content that were seen to be defamatory. A blogger's content appearing in the search engine's results was also targeted with a request for removal.

Google would not comment on the transparency report, the details of the requests, or which requests had resulted in content being removed.

But the report states: "Prior to releasing the first online transparency report in the history of the web, Google struggled with overly broad government requests for users' information, and stood out as one of the few companies to resist such requests."

The judiciary also did not wish to address its relationship with Google.

However, members of New Zealand's legal fraternity have expressed a discontent over Google seemingly "thumbing its nose" at court orders to remove content.