Google Bringing Back The ‘Forgotten’ Links After Pressure

Updated on

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has reinstated some of the links that were removed after the divisive ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling. According to an article from The Guardian, some of its articles that were earlier removed are back on the search engine.  The search engine giant said that it was a ‘difficult’ process.

Flip side of ‘right to be forgotten’

The discussion over the ruling came alive again, when BBC economics editor Robert Peston was informed that the blog post he wrote in 2007 would not be shown, when a specific search was carried out.

Also, a few days back, The Guardian reported that six of its articles are no more available on Google.co.uk. One of the articles was related to the retirement of a soccer referee owing to some controversy.

The article was related to the exit of then-Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal after the company posted massive losses. The email from Google read, “We regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google.”

The main reason, for removing the links was that someone who was the mentioned in the article asked Google to forget them, based on the EU ruling.

Google in learning phase

Peter Barron, head of communications for Google in Europe, told BBC that the company is learning with the process and denied the allegations that company has approved all the requests to mark its anger against the European ruling.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “We are aiming to deal with it as responsibly as possible.” Barron said that the European Court of Justice bequeathed this ruling, and now it is the law in Europe with which the company will have to conform. He added that Google has to do a fine tuning between the need for transparency and protect people’s identity.

Barron said that Google is making utmost efforts to abide by the rule of ECJ that ordered the links can be removed from the web pages if they are considered to be “outdated,” irrelevant or no longer relevant.

From the time, the company allowed the European sites to apply formally for the link removal; it has received around 70,000 requests. Even though the frequency of the requests has degenerated, Google is still receiving 1000 requests every day. In France, till now, over 14,000 requests have flowed, ahead of Germany’s 12,000 and UK’s 8000 requests.

Leave a Comment