[seren]

Actually, it was not removed from the newspaper archive, because the article referring Mr. Gonzalez was published under a judicial injunction. And so his request was rejected by the Spanish court of data protection. But the case was upheld against Google.

Full EU court ruling in the following link: http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...

I think the case make a distinction between a newspaper publication that is rather ephemeral and spatially located vs a search engine that plays a big part in disseminating information or any other "data processor" that can potentially expose the information for ever.

The crux of the argument seems to be that even if you are only indexing, by definition, you are managing/duplicating data, and in some case, they are private data so you have a responsibility before the person being identified (the "data subject").