The court’s ruling allows people to ask search engines to delist results to content that is inadequate, irrelevant or not in the public interest, the so-called “right to be forgotten”.
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In other cases, Google rejected a politician’s request to remove news about a decade-old criminal conviction, but removed a teacher’s link about a minor conviction years ago.
Google denied that it intentionally buried the search results of rivals Yelp and TripAdvisor and claimed the problem was the result of a coding “glitch”, it has emerged.
Wiping the link from search engines does not remove the actual Web page from the Internet, and Google now only extends that kind of scrubbing to Europe-specific domains, but not the standard Google.com that is used in the United States. The top 10 sites accounted for 9 per cent of all of the removals.
Yelp shared internal research showing that around one-third of navigational searches on Google for “Yelp” and a random accompanying term were directed away from Yelp, reports Recode.
Google had not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment at publication time. It has been suggested that the European Union case could expand to include local search results, so it is hardly surprising that Yelp is pushing for United States authorities to take similar action.
Latvia: A political activist who was stabbed at a protest asked Google to remove a link to an article about the incident.
Stoppelman expressed doubt that Yelp’s drop in mobile search results was due to a bug. Rather, it is a part of a pattern of behavior that the company has been employing. Executives complained on social media that location searches produced Google’s own local search results on top, while pushing down rival search results, even if the latter’s name was specifically mentioned in the search. Facebook.com is on the first spot with over 10,000 links removed while Profile Engine, Google Groups, YouTube, Badoo, and Twitter also made it into the list. This was because, as Mr. Kaufer observed, a search for “tripadvisor Hilton” produced Google’s own results, above TripAdvisor’s links, with its mapping service and information on prices of different branches of the hotel.
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While it’s so far complied with “right to be forgotten” rules, Google is still clashing with European governments over their scope – including whether the policy should extend to non-European versions of Google Search.
