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Google Releases Info On 2.4 Million 'Right To Be Forgotten' Requests (engadget.com)
According to Google's latest transparency report, the company has received 2.4 million "right to be forgotten" requests since 2014, most of which came from private individuals. Engadget reports: Europe's biggest court passed the right to be forgotten law in 2014, compelling the tech titan to remove personal info from its search engine upon request. In the report, Google has revealed that it complied with 43.3 percent of all the requests it's gotten and has also detailed the nature of those takedown pleas. France, Germany and the UK apparently generated 51 percent of all the URL delisting appeals. Overall, 89 percent of the takedown pleas came from private individuals: Non-government figures such as celebrities submitted 41,213 of the URLs in Google's pile, while politicians and government officials submitted 33,937. As Gizmodo noted, though, there's a small group of law firms and reputation management services submitting numerous pleas, suggesting the rise of reputation-fixing business in the region.
Out of those 2.4 million requests, 19.1 percent are directory URLs, while news websites and social networks only make up 17.6 and 11.6 percent of them. Majority of the URLs submitted for removal are random online destinations that don't fall under any of the previous categories. As for the takedown's reasons, it looks 18.1 percent of the submissions want their professional info scrubbed, 7.7 percent want info they previously posted online themselves to be removed and 6.1 percent want their crimes hidden from search.
Out of those 2.4 million requests, 19.1 percent are directory URLs, while news websites and social networks only make up 17.6 and 11.6 percent of them. Majority of the URLs submitted for removal are random online destinations that don't fall under any of the previous categories. As for the takedown's reasons, it looks 18.1 percent of the submissions want their professional info scrubbed, 7.7 percent want info they previously posted online themselves to be removed and 6.1 percent want their crimes hidden from search.
Is Google the only goddam search engine on the planet?
Why is it always, "Google, Google, Google?" Did Momma always like Google best?
Is Bing a thing?
Google 74.52%
Baidu 10.49%
Bing 7.98%
Yahoo! 5.41%
Effectively, yes.
They started out with a superior product. Unfortunately they are beginning to act like a monopolist. I'm pretty heavily conservative, but there are times when a company gathers such a large chunk of the market that maybe free-market economics aren't enough... I hate the fact that the government might have to get involved but I don't know what the solution would be in situations like this. It's not as simple as choosing a different search engine (I've done that and it's not that the others are a little worse, they are orders of magnitude shittier.
Bing sucks.. I mean they just really suck. The search returns just aren't nearly as accurate or relevant.. Like it or hate it, the search engines (Google in particular) have become the gateways to the web (for most people, like.. 90%+ probably (this is an educated guess based on my real world observations). Maybe when companies control that much information, maybe they should be subject to 1st amendment (anti-censorship) restrictions.. I dunno...