Given two headlines:

- "foo suspected of sexual misconduct" @t=0

- "foo proved to be innocent in sexual misconduct case" @t+1 mo/yr/whatevs

Guess:

- what people will consciously or subconsciously remember when scanning through Google results

- which one will get the most clicks/views/pagerank at various points in time

That is, if they ever continue and look for the second one. And even if it were the last one, many (most?) people will be subconsciously biased anyway by the shock effect of the foo <-> sexual misconduct tie, which obliterates the "innocent" part.

People aren't proven innocent (at least in the US), they're found "not guilty", which is significantly distinct

This makes sense, but you also have to think of the other side; there are a lot of people who have been victims of sexual misconduct but there was not enough evidence to convict the perpetrator. Don't those people have the right to REMEMBER what happened to them, and tell people about what happened to them if they want to?

Totally, and I'm in favour of people figuring out what the facts are by themselves over Google doing that on their behalf. My call was more for those people to keep my comment in mind when they're doing so.

Right, but if I write a blog post about my experience with someone, don't I have a right to have that blog post indexed by google if I want?

In our modern world, 'people figuring out what the facts are by themselves' means searching via google. How else are people supposed to figure out facts for themselves?

Yes, that's what I'm saying - I agree. It's just that when people read those blogs, they should not equate that to "proven to have happened", which is what the person above appeared to be doing.