[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?