Interestingly, especially given that any resulting court case will likely hinge on free speech, when I search for Matthias Wermke on Google from the UK, alongside the results I get this message -
"Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe. Learn more"
With the "Learn More" linking to a page on the recent EU right to be forgotten ruling.
This message does not appear for the other artist, Mischa Leinkauf.
That could just mean Google's algorithm isn't perfect. And Google only needs to ensure that the disclaimer appears often enough so that people won't assume its presence means results were removed.
I definite recall it being stated that the disclaimers would be shown for name searches in Europe, not just name searches with results removed.
Saying it just tries to flag all names, but just doesn't spot "John Smith" or "Alison Smith" as names, while managing ones such as "James Smith" and "Bob Smith", isn't very plausible.
I get this (from Germany) for almost any common name combination. And also for my name even though I never requested a removal - nor am I famous enough to be mentioned in other publications.
I guess Google just adds this footer whenever someone searches for a name.
There are at least two other Matthias Wermkes that I ran into while searching around.
Without tracing which pages are filtered it's hard to say who requested it. I get the message no matter which keywords I add to try to isolate one of them.
True. I wonder if anyone has made a google results diffing tool yet. There must be one out there somewhere already, though whether it would show up on google results is another matter.
I diffed for my name (because I really was curious why I was on the list). Local German IP vs US VPN. The results were the same. In a different order but all items were the same for the first 10 pages.
So I guess it's just a "let's slap that footer onto all name related searches so we save a few DB queries".
"Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe. Learn more"
With the "Learn More" linking to a page on the recent EU right to be forgotten ruling.
This message does not appear for the other artist, Mischa Leinkauf.