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Comment by jontro | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that they have already received 91000 removal requests involving more than 320 000 urls.

53% of these have been removed, this is having a big impact...

Note also that the URLs themselves are not removed from the search corpus; instead, they are elided from results when they are matches for a search with a particular name in them. The URLs themselves are still eligible to be returned in response to queries that don't include the specific name.

Opportunity to resolve the public interest for SEO guys? What did they call it in High School yearbooks, the superlatives page? I was trying to remember who are the "litigious bastards" but Google and Urban Dictionary remembered it for me...

There was an effort (I can't find the link) to create a catalog of all of the links and terms that it was requested for Google to forget. Some folks (not me, but some folks I'm sure) could spend a long time coming up with the best search terms for the most egregious "bad examples" of people demanding to be forgotten in this way, how hard could it be to make sure they show up in the top results? :)

http://hiddenfromgoogle.com/

Not really. Google returns millions of results for every search. 320,000 urls isn't a lot and the number of people that were searching for this stuff and were effected is probably quite low.

It depends on each url popularity, I doubt any of the requests deals with a ressource you would find on the 500 th page of a search result.

EU citizens will have the search results censored but the rest of the world will not, nor will any European who is mildly tech savvy. How is this not useless whack-a-mole?

As the documents states: "Fewer than 5% of European users use google.com, and we think travelers are a significant portion of those."

So this affects pretty much all europeans.

Do you believe that most Europeans won't know that their search results are being censored? Or that they won't care?

Yes?

Or maybe that they agree with the intentions of that law.

My point is that even if you agree with the intentions of the law it will not prevent Europeans from finding the truth if they want it.

But that's not what the law aims for either. It's just supposed to make finding those results harder, so that you don't accidentally stumble upon them, but have to actually search for them.

??? It's exactly the opposite If you actually search for them, you get nothing. If you stumble around, you may find them.

I certainly don't its a "pious" law written by people with zero grasp of reality - the same ones that gave us the cookie law.

So what if it's useless whack-a-mole?

It's compliant with an EU ruling. It'll keep a few people happy where those people used to think they were the subjects of harassment before. That will stop those people using the police for this stuff. (Front line police in England spend maybe half their time dealing with online harassment, bullying, threats, trolling, etc).

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