[microtonal]

Sure, it is a hard balance to get right. But privacy is an important right and we should not throw it away because it creates some extra effort for a multi-billion dollar company.

I also find it weak that Page plays the 'think of the startups' card. In fact, I think that since the Snowden leaks, there are far more opportunities to create privacy-aware or privacy-protecting services. E.g., I am pretty sure that Duckduckgo, a startup in search, benefitted tremendously from the recent attention to privacy issues.

[cbr]

DuckDuckGo certainly has benefited from privacy becoming more salient, but this ruling is probably negative for them. Each of these removal requests needs manual review to keep people from requesting takedowns of other people's stuff. There are ~500M people eligible to request takedowns under the ruling, and if 1% of them ask for one link removed per year that's 14k requests per day. If each request takes 5min then you need 143 people working full time. Which high but doable for Google, but at ~20 employees this would be an enormous burden for DDG.

These numbers could be higher if someone puts out a campaign that goes viral and gets lots of people submitting requests, and there's nothing that stops people outside the EU from submitting (invalid) requests.

One thing in DDG's favor, however, is that that at first people are probably only going to send these requests to Google.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, on open source software.

[microtonal]

There are ~500M people eligible to request takedowns under the ruling, and if 1% of them ask for one link removed per year that's 14k requests per day. If each request takes 5min then you need 143 people working full time. Which high but doable for Google, but at ~20 employees this would be an enormous burden for DDG.

You are making a mistake in your math here, since a sizeable portion of that 500M people use Google, but probably only a fraction of a percent uses DDG.

In other words, if DDG's usage is currently 1% that of Google (which would surprise me), that's 1.43 people. If you are a search company of 20 people, it seems reasonable to me to have at least a few people working on keeping your index clean.

[cbr]

For my privacy to be protected in this way it doesn't matter what search engine I use, it matters what search engine the people who are trying to look me up use. If I want a fact about me to not come up when people search for my name I would need to remove it from any search engine others might look in. This is a lower barrier than usage, but you're right that at least for now people probably won't bother submitting these to DDG.

Unless someone makes a single form for submitting a removal request to all/most search engines? Though I guess then the search engines could pool together and do some kind of centralized processing of these requests?

[mike_hearn]

DuckDuckGo is primarily a Bing frontend, no? I seem to recall that they claim to be a real search engine and have their own crawler, but any time someone analyses their results deeply they're almost always identical to Bing.

Given that Microsoft has a large EU presence and is presumably also affected by this law, perhaps they will have to start doing the same thing as Google. Which would then automatically feed through to DuckDuckGo.

I don't believe there are any competitive startup search engines at the moment. However, this doesn't mean there would never be. Plus this ruling is so vague it's likely to impact all kinds of companies that are not startups: think specialised social networks, etc.

[Vik1ng]

Also open data like OpenStreetMap will really help DuckDuckGo and other services to contest google in that market. Especiylly when that data is connected to Wikipedia & Wikidata then they can show similar snippets as google.

[marincounty]

Duckduckgo is getting better each quarter. Whenever I type anything into a search engine; I now pause for a micro second, 1/8 of the time I access DDG.

[yuhong]

It doesn't create extra effort just for the companies involved.

[arrrg]

I don’t really see what privacy has to do with it. Really. Privacy, to me, isn’t something that is timed. Either it’s ok to state something publicly or not, time shouldn’t matter in my opinion.

[seren]

Privacy is only very tangentially linked to what you say, this is also related to what you did, or even what happened to you in a passive way.

Let's say that 20 years ago your family was murdered under your eyes by an axe-wielding maniac when you were 4 years old. Now as a potential employer, I type your name on Google and the first result is an article from 20 years ago. Maybe I am prejudiced but I wonder if you would be a pretty stable employee, and as a result, I bin your CV.

This has nothing to do with being able to "state" something but this is really a privacy issue.