How does Google "remove" entries? Do they just exclude certains pages from results? If so, that's not really a solution since that information is still publicly available.
It would make much more sense to remove all web pages (from newspapers etc.) containing the actual data, and ideally Google would forget about it as well soon. But then again, that would be a lot of work and it's easier to just take down the gateway. But it's ridiculous.
I wonder if this will harm Google as a search engine even further. It's not as if they are removing the content, merely the index entry. Others will still return the result.
It could also be security related. I know occasionally companies accidentally make things public they didn’t intend to be public due to misconfiguration. Once this happens, those pages are available in the Google cache even when they’re no longer accessible. You can request the cached results be removed, but this takes time.
Google doesn't link to search engines in its results, that's their policy, so I would think those sites will be removed from their index at some point.
The point is that the search results would quickly disappear if the original pages were removed (since the search engine would remove them from its index too).
It's not the case because it's easier to target the search engines rather than the N websites which have published a story.
Yes, that's an unfair practice. Ans they disable Google cache at the same time. Why do I see it in the results when I can't read it without making an account, or worse paying some subscription. It should be hidden then.
But Google drily noted that in some cases Web users are overestimating just how much of the online space the company can control: "Sometimes we even receive requests to remove content 'from the Internet,'" the company reports. Google might have a great deal of power over what happens online. But not that much.
Removing something from Google search results effectively does remove it from the Internet. If you can't find something, then it may as well not exist. It's a bit scary how much control Google has over the Internet.
For vast amounts of people (probably well over majority, but who knows), if it doesn't show up in a Google search, it might as well have been deleted from the internet. Hell, try running a business that doesn't show up in a Google search result. You might as well not exist.
EDIT: Also, keep in mind that many sites now use Google as their search tool. So going to the domain and searching for an article in their website that you've seen in the past wouldn't even work.
Hmm, I think I was wrong. The post says "we will evaluate all content on the web page to ensure that we're not limiting the availability of other information that is broadly useful, for instance in news articles" which does make it sound like they would be removing the page from all search results?
Thought experiment: take all of the queries that Google deals with during a year. Then run all of the results together to get a set of webpages represented by the first five pages of results (does anybody still try to go beyond page 5?).
This is good. More clicks to the news sites and google is more like Reddit now. But it is sad that there had to be a law for that. Gooogle should give the option to remove anything but the title from the page result (is this possible?).
That's what Google already did. The results include the article titles, but no longer include the snippets that expanded on the information in the title.
It would make much more sense to remove all web pages (from newspapers etc.) containing the actual data, and ideally Google would forget about it as well soon. But then again, that would be a lot of work and it's easier to just take down the gateway. But it's ridiculous.
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