Microsoft and Yahoo join Google in deleting search results under right to be forgotten ruling

Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo search engines have started to fulfil the controversial requests

Microsoft and Yahoo have joined Google in scrubbing certain results from their search engines in response to people’s requests.

Bing and Yahoo search are responding to the ‘right to be forgotten’, a ruling by the European Union that people had a right to ask search engines to stop including material that’s out of date in their results.

Google has been responding to requests made under ruling for some time — and details the requests in its Transparency Report — but Bing and Yahoo are now also seeing results removed from search.

Bing published the form that users send in to have results removed in July, but has now started removing requests, according to Forgot.me, which helps users apply the ruling. The site is run by reputation management firm Reputation VIP.

The company said that there have been 699 demand through their site since July 23, representing 2,362 sites. So far, 79 of those requests have received an answer from Bing.

Most have been accepted on the basis of being invasions of privacy. Bing has rejected two on te basis of being unjustified, and 77 more that were on social networks where it thought the network itself should remove the post.

“Please use the content removal tool and processes available from the social media website in question,” Bing said in response to those requests.

Users tend to submit requests far more to Google than Bing, Forget.me said, with 78% of requests going to the latter.

Similar requests are now being accepted by Yahoo, reports said, though Forget.me’s data does not include information on that site.

“We will carefully evaluate each request with the goal of balancing the individual’s right to privacy with considerations of the public’s right to information,” a Yahoo spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal.

The right to be forgotten has prompted strong criticism from anti-censorship campaigners since it was revealed in the summer, though others have accused Google of intentionally skewing the ruling to attract anger.

The European Union said last week that it wanted the results, which currently are only hidden on EU domains, to apply across the internet.