Google has deleted links to more than 500,000 websites from the European versions of its search engines to comply with Europe s Right to be Forgotten, the company reports Tuesday.
The Internet giant received the most requests to remove links to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Profileengine.com, another search engine, and other sites.
A landmark 2014 European Union court ruling affirmed Europeans right to request search engines like Google to remove search results about them.
While the offending website — a news article about a crime, a person s address tucked into an online document — remains online, it becomes much harder to find if Google doesn t include it in its search results.
In one German example, Google removed the page in search results of an article about a rape that included the victim s name.
To date, Google has received 347,000 requests regarding links to 1.2 million sites, the company reported. It removed the links in 42 percent of the cases.
France is the origin of most requests — some 73,000 involving 245,000 sites — followed by Germany, with roughly 60,000 requests involving 220,000 sites.
Liechtenstein, one of the smaller countries in the European Union, was the source of 80 requests and 148 sites.
Google is currently battling some European countries such as France that want the company to remove links not only to search results within Europe but also globally. The company has responded, writes Fortune, by more aggressively redirecting Google users who try to use Google.com to national versions of the site.
Above: The Googleplex in September 2015 (Photo by Matt O Brien)
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