How Google determined our right to be forgotten

Re:How Google determined our right to be forgotten by ademarre on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @01:15PM (#9070010)

Google and the other search engines offer a standard mechanism for websites to tag such content so it won't be indexed. That's a much better solution for the man in the article. As it is now he has to make a request to every search engine to remove these search results, including new future search engines that might arise. Such victims would be better served if they could go to the source website to have such content deindexed for all search engines at once.

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Re:How Google determined our right to be forgotten by benologist on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @01:21PM (#9070043)

How can this man, and everyone else, be guaranteed the ability to change somebody else's pages to ensure they're no longer indexed by search engines that explicitly dishonor the spirit and purpose of instructions not to crawl pages?

IF that was ever viable the EU wouldn't have forced a solution.

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/

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Re:How Google determined our right to be forgotten by ademarre on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @02:22PM (#9070417)

> search engines that explicitly dishonor the spirit and purpose of instructions not to crawl pages

If you believe that to be true, then you should be arguing for a solution to that problem.

A robots noindex meta would work perfectly well to suppress an online bankruptcy notice about an individual.

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Re:How Google determined our right to be forgotten by benologist on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @02:47PM (#9070545)

In that video you'll see Matt Cutts from Google's Web Spam team explaining how they've declared indexing a url on google, and crawling a url's content, are apparently separate things so your express wishes can be overridden by any third party linking to your content, resulting in the URL being on google search and in results with inferred content instead of spidered content.

I think this is a problem, but this is not the entirety of the right to be forgotten problem, which just makes what you proposed more efficient because people only have to contact one company with an official procedure.

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Re:How Google determined our right to be forgotten by ademarre on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @03:12PM (#9070659)

Crawling and indexing truly are fundamentally different things, and search engines have mechanisms to block both.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en

> You can prevent a page from appearing in Google Search by including a noindex meta tag in the page's HTML code. When Googlebot next crawls that page, Googlebot will see the noindex meta tag and will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.

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Re:How Google determined our right to be forgotten by benologist on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @04:04PM (#9070920)

For all intents and purposes "indexing" and "crawling" is "appearing in search results", and they conflate these terms themselves in their robots.txt page:

> "You only need a robots.txt file if your site includes content that you don't want Google or other search engines to index."

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en

They do say noindex overrides 3rd party links so that's something, but it's a moot point either way because this was the approach for the last decade. Having to contact each individual person in charge of each individual URL isn't even effective when the MPAA throws money+DMCA at the task, individuals asking nicely never had a chance.

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