The Google right-to-be-forgotten challenge continues apace with the news that for the first time the search engine giant is going to remove a link to a Wikipedia page following a request.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about then here’s a quick explanation; there’s been a European ruling under which people can request that search engines are asked by people to disregard links about things which they believe are unjust or out of date.
Google revealed last week that, as of mid July, it had received more than 91,000 requests to delete a total of 328,000 links under the European ruling.
The most requests came from France and Germany, with approximately 17,500 and 16,500 respectively.
A further 12,000 removal requests came from Britain, 8,000 from Spain, and 7,500 from Italy with Google admitting 53 per cent of the links targeted were removed.
This has caused a headache for Google as how do you judge what’s relevant and what isn’t - much of the stuff may be subjective.
However, what seems to have been lost is the content that is no longer linked to does still exist - just not from a European version of the search engine.
So if you live in the USA you can still find out what it is - and the other thing is that the originator of the content gets a message about the link being removed.
So, as has been the case in the UK, some newspapers, websites and businesses have simply written a story about the removal of the link to Google and republished the original story.
Which means that Google’s algorhythm then sees the new story about the link as well as the republished story and then puts them back into search results.
The net result is that for those who wish to be forgotten, then they are actually worse off than they were to begin with.
