There's no sensible reason for EU regulations to have anything to do with the search results that I (as a non-EU citizen, searching from outside the EU, most likely using entirely non-EU servers, network connections and so on) see. I agree that the EU has the economic and political power to impose these regulations (on Google, Bing, Yahoo, ...). I just think that, even though they can, they shouldn't.
This is exactly the same sort of extraterritorial bullshit that drives the EU (and EU citizens) nuts when the US does it. See, for example, the US government demanding, from Microsoft, the emails of EU citizens stored on EU servers in response to a US search warrant. Or the volumes of requirements (tax monitoring, sanctions compliance and so on) the US imposes on non-US banks even when their only US connection is they sometimes transfer dollars between non-US customers.
EU citizens and EU regulators might care deeply about the "right to be forgotten", but if they think that endorsing and emulating the US's extraterritorial grandstanding in its name is going to be anything but a gigantic net loss for European privacy, they're kidding themselves, at best. Google's response to the "right to be forgotten" has been disappointing and frustrating (though I doubt we'd agree on why). What similarly powerful governments (e.g. US, China, ...) end up doing with the new tools the EU is forging to enforce that right will be terrifying.
Whether that is functionally identical with censorship or not is another debate.
We can have that debate, but it will end in some gray area where a convicted criminal that has served his sentence should probably be able to clear his name in the search engines and where a politician that was caught in some scandal will not be able to do the same (because he was a public figure at the time).
Censorship requests can simply be stonewalled until the company is sued and then the judges can side with Google or the claimant on a case-by-case basis.