GOOGLE HAS RECEIVED more than 41,000 requests in the first four days from Europeans who wish to have information removed from its search results.

After Google placed a form online for people to complete if they wanted certain personal information removed on Friday, it’s received more than 12,000 requests on the first day alone, according to the Financial Times,

The majority of requests came from Germany and the UK, and involved one man who tried to kill his family and wanted a new article about the event removed.

Google may be required to hire extra staff or redirect internal resources to deal with the flood of requests after promising to use people and not algorithms to decide which links to remove. It’s expected that the first links will disappear from the search engine after the middle of June.

The ruling from the European Court of Justice stated that individuals have the right to have links to information about them removed from search under specific circumstances, such as being outdated or inaccurate. It said that such requests should be balanced against a public interest in the information being linked to.

While links can be removed from the search engine, the actual pages will still be accessible through other means.

Google has no plans to remove information from the US version of its search engine, meaning that Europeans will still be able to go there to search for information that has been removed from the local version.

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