Google’s link removal only affects search results on its European sites.
Advertisement
Google has removed a little more than 441,000 webpages from its search results in Europe since a court ruled previous year that citizens have a “right to be forgotten” online, a new update says. The company says that it eliminated 42 percent URLs from the search engine results while 58 percent were kept.
According to the legal complaint, there were a lot of users sold out over the course of the deal: “over 400 million profiles were aggregated, along with over 15 billion “friendship” connections between people and 3 billion “likes”.
This latest transparency report shows the requests cover a wide range of sources.
When links are removed from its index, Google notifies the websites that are affected, but those sites are not required to remove content.
You can find more information about Google’s link removal efforts, including a countrywise break-up of URLs removed, on this page.
Google has revealed in its Wednesday report that the “right to be forgotten” requests which it has received till now have targeted approximately 1.23 million Internet pages (URLs).
Meanwhile, the report indicated that Google granted about 38 percent of the 43,101 requests submitted in the United Kingdom; 37 percent of the 33,106 requests in Spain, and just shy of 30 percent of the 26,186 requests made in fifth-placed Italy.
An outline of scenarios produced by Google, which is likely to lead to information being forgotten in searches, included pages with content exclusively about someone’s health, race, religion or sexual orientation. Ten individual sites account for about 9 percent of all removals.
The top websites where search results to content were removed were in order: Facebook.com, profileengine.com, groups.google.com, youtube.com and badoo.com.
“We may decline to delist if we determined that the page contains information which is strongly in the public interest”, Google said in an online post. Among the top domains in the right-to-be-forgotten listing are Facebook, Twitter and even Google+.
Latvia: A political activist who was stabbed at a protest asked Google to remove a link to an article about the incident.
Advertisement
“Determining whether content is in the public interest is complex and may mean considering many diverse factors”.
