He's 62. There's a chance he doesn't have a good understanding of written English. He types his name into a www Search engine, and sees results returned that are his name, and photographs of criminals, or his name and words like "gangland" or "criminal".
He fills in a form, but does so incorrectly.
IMO Google's notorious lack of customer support left them open here. Getting him and his lawyers in a room with a good translator and someone who can explain the situation and walk him through it may have avoided the court cost. This is cheaper than the $250,000 that Yahoo have paid him.
But then I have no idea how many people send valid (but malformed) requests to Google asking for tweaks to web-results. Maybe it's millions each year and there's not much they can do.
It's hard to tell from the linked article when the "now defunct" website became defunct, and why. Did it just close for normal reasons, or was it shut down because of legal action? Because if a website was closed for defamatory material, and Google still has a cache of it, and someone tries to get that cache removed (but botches the request) then really Google should try a bit harder.
Obviously my post contains a bunch of guessing, and Google is unlikely to release information about this, so I'm happy to accept that perhaps I'm wrong.
Two judges in two separate cases don't think these are nonsense lawsuits.
I think technical companies should realise that sometimes unclueful people will need to interact with them, and those people will not be able to use the provided forms and will not be able to use the correct jargon but it is still in the company's best interest to listen to, and understand, those people so as to prevent court action.
You avoid court action because it's slow and expensive and because it is unpredictable. (Although, since he'd already won a case, it's not that unpredictable.)
What should this guy have done? He's tried to jump through the unnecessary hoops, and it didn't work. Why should he "suffer"[1] while the multi-billion dollar company makes money off "associating his name with criminality"[2]? (Please note careful use of scare quotes.)
[1] for various values of suffer, including not something that's probably not too severe for most people
[2] assuming they had ads on the search pages with the relevant results; and I know the association (if any) is caused by the creators of the original website.
I don't even understand why there should be a way for them to remove his search results.
The search engine reports on what other sites say about people. They are not generating new content -- they consolidate results that are a map of reality. Silencing them, does not change the fact that the other sites have that content. Google is reporting true facts in its search engine: this site says X about Y. How is that not a true statement of fact? Truth should be (morally not legally) a defense here.
This is where libel laws in these ridiculous venues goes wrong.
I'm assuming he's already had the other sites remove their content, and he's just trying to get the cache cleared. I'm assuming that he followed Google's procedure to have the cache cleared, but made a mistake, and that's why they didn't do it.
Rather than continue to struggle with a faceless corporation he just gave up and went to law.
He fills in a form, but does so incorrectly.
IMO Google's notorious lack of customer support left them open here. Getting him and his lawyers in a room with a good translator and someone who can explain the situation and walk him through it may have avoided the court cost. This is cheaper than the $250,000 that Yahoo have paid him.
But then I have no idea how many people send valid (but malformed) requests to Google asking for tweaks to web-results. Maybe it's millions each year and there's not much they can do.
It's hard to tell from the linked article when the "now defunct" website became defunct, and why. Did it just close for normal reasons, or was it shut down because of legal action? Because if a website was closed for defamatory material, and Google still has a cache of it, and someone tries to get that cache removed (but botches the request) then really Google should try a bit harder.
Obviously my post contains a bunch of guessing, and Google is unlikely to release information about this, so I'm happy to accept that perhaps I'm wrong.