Google revealed that it grants half of the de-index requests it receives at a meeting with the European Court of Justice.
The search giant, along with Yahoo and Microsoft, had been called before the court to answer questions about how they have handle de-indexing requests resulting from the courts “right to be forgotten” ruling, which requires the search engines to remove links to content deemed to be inaccurate, outdated or irrelevant, ZDNet reports.
However, concerns have arisen over Google’s current practices in complying with requests. The company notifies the publisher of the links to be de-indexed, which often leads to even greater public attention toward the content, somewhat defeating the purpose of the request in the first place.
So far, few details have merged from the meeting, although TechCrunch reports that Google has confirmed that rejects about one third of de-index requests, asks for more information for 15 percent of requests and grants about half of all requests.
According to PCWorld, officials asked a number of questions about the de-indexing process, such as the legal basis for sending notifications to publishers and displaying them in censored results, both of which Google does. The meeting was also intended to address the question of on which domains the results would be de-indexed. Google, for example, has drawn criticism for removing results from its European domains but not its .com domain.
Although the answers to these questions have not yet been announced, the three companies were asked to submit further answers in writing by the end of the month.