Google deletes controversial sites from foreign versions
Forced by threat of legal action, Google has been deleting sites that violate local laws (for example anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi in Germany) or are brought to their attention, according to this News.com story:
The Harvard report, prepared by law student Ben Edelman and assistant professor Jonathan Zittrain, and scheduled to be released Thursday, is the result of automated testing of Google's massive 2.5 billion-page index and a comparison of the results returned by different foreign-language versions. The duo found 113 excluded sites, most with racial overtones.
was criticized in March for bowing to a demand from the Church of Scientology to delete critical sites from its index. In a response that won praise, Google replied by pledging to report future legal threats to theChillingEffects.org site run by law school clinics....Edelman, of Harvard's Berkman Center, suggests that Google find a way to alert users that information is missing from their search results.
"If Google is prohibited from linking to Stormfront, they could include a listing but no link," Edelman said. "And if they can't even include a listing for Stormfront, they could at least report the fact that they've hidden results from the user. The core idea here is that there's no need to be secretive."