Google has come under fire for its "clumsy" approach to obeying Europe's new "right to be forgotten" law, after it began blocking some name-based searches to articles on the websites of UK news organisations.
The Guardian, Daily Mail and BBC complained about the search engine implementing a ruling made in May by Europe's highest court, the European court of justice, by starting to remove links to some pages when searches are made against particular names.
Google sources admit it may be suffering teething problems as it struggles to implement the system, under which it reviews then rejects or allows the removal of links. The original pages on publishers' sites are untouched, and can be found via US based search engines, or by using search criteria that leave out the particular name.
Publishers suggested Google was being too hasty in allowing removal of searches against specific names for information that was not "inaccurate, irrelevant or outdated" the key tests under the ECJ ruling.
The ECJ also said removal requests from people "in public life" could be ignored.
Google deals with more than 90% of Europe's online searches. It said it had received more than 70,000 requests to remove links to more than 276,000 web pages from Europeans, with most coming from France, Germany, the UK, Spain and Italy respectively. It said it was now receiving about 1,000 requests daily, from a high of more than 12,000 soon after the ruling.
On Wednesday Google removed links via searches on an unspecified name to pages from 2010 and 2011 on the Guardian and Daily Mail. The stories covered a referee in Scotland, Dougie McDonald, who admitted lying about awarding a penalty in the Scottish FA Cup. The links have since been reinstated and can be found on searches for McDonald's name. McDonald did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the Guardian.
The removal and rapid reversal have thrown a spotlight on those newly-hired by Google to vet requests. It is understood that a supervised team of "paralegals" – who are not professional lawyers – have been given the legal task of examining every request and making a decision on whether to approve it.
The BBC's economics editor, Robert Peston, complained Google had "cast me into oblivion" after the corporation received a notification that a blogpost he wrote in 2007 had been excluded from a search, though the name against which the search was excluded was not specified.
Ryan Heath, the spokesman for the European commission's vice-president Neelie Kroes, told the BBC that he couldn't see how Google's decision to remove Peston's blogpost from search results was in the public interest, adding that the "right to be forgotten" ruling should not allow people to "Photoshop their own lives".
The Guardian understands it was not the content of Peston's piece, on former Merrill Lynch boss Stan O'Neal, but comments on the post that were targeted. Searches on O'Neal still return the article.
A Guardian News & Media spokesperson said: "We are always concerned about any attempts to block access to our content. The recent ECJ judgment requires Google to deal with these requests on a case-by-case basis, so their current approach appears to be an overly broad interpretation. If the purpose of the judgment is not to enable censorship of publishers by the back door, then we'd encourage Google to be transparent about the criteria it is using to make these decisions, and how publishers can challenge them."
Mail Online's publisher, Martin Clarke, told Associated Press that the link removal was "the equivalent of going into libraries and burning books you don't like".
Jimmy Wales, one of the members of a committee formed by Google to examine how to implement the ECJ ruling, commented on Twitter about Peston's experience: "This is what I have been saying. Censoring Google is censoring the press."
However Julia Powles, a law researcher at Cambridge University, said: "The way that the ruling is currently being implemented adds strength to those who take an absolutist position in favour of free speech and free enterprise. The situation is much more subtle, just as it is much more subtle than the unhelpful catchphrase of the 'right to be forgotten'.
"There is a risk that an all-or-nothing approach and the highlighting of dubious cases to prominent news outlets and journalists will preclude legitimate claims from being fairly treated. We need much more information from Google about how it is prioritising complaints, as well as how its internal decision-makers are trained and what principles they are applying."
David Erdos, lecturer in law at Cambridge University, said that it was "worrying that Google seems to give itself complete discretion to provide details of removed detail to third parties such as webmasters". Erdos said that data protection can cover "simply privacy intrusion" and that on that basis it might be necessary to consider that notifying sites, which might then retaliate by putting up new content about people, "would cause them unwarranted damage and/or distress".
A Google spokesperson said: "We have recently started taking action on the removals requests we've received after the European court of justice decision. This is a new and evolving process for us. We'll continue to listen to feedback and will also work with data protection authorities and others as we comply with the ruling."Google last week began including a disclaimer around name-based searches in Europe to say that "some results may have been removed", and on Wednesday began contacting news organisations telling them about specific articles. The ECJ ruling in May followed a dispute between a Spanish lawyer and a newspaper and Google there. The lawyer, Mario Costeja González, complained that a March 1998 judgment against him published on the newspaper's website appeared high in Google Spain's search rankings. He argued that under Europe's data protection directive, "outdated, irrelevant or incorrect" information should be removed.
The ECJ ruled that the newspaper was not covered because it was a publisher, but that Google was because it was a "data processor" which worked on personal information.
Following are the six Guardian articles removed from Google searches to date:
• Dougie McDonald, Scottish referee who lied over reversing penalty quits
• Referee at centre of Celtic penalty incident escapes with a warning
• Dougie McDonald penalty saga exposes need for SFA transparency
• Accused solicitor stands for office
• An aggregated page of Roy Greenslade's blogs from a week in 2011
• This article was amended on 4 July 2014. Because of an editing error, the earlier version stated incorrectly that Ryan Heath had "said he couldn't see how the right to be forgotten ruling was in the public interest".
