Another example of the misguided view of Google by the States.  Google simply indexes what it discovers on the internet.  They do a masterful job, as evidenced by over 70% of users in the US use Google rather than Bing, or DuckDuckGo, or anybody else (the use in Europe is over 90%). They do not advocate which sites to place at the top of their rankings, but it is an algorithm that determines their rankings based on the number and popularity of external links,  among other things.

States, at the beckoning of Google competitors, are going after Google for publishing sites that have illegal content.  Not having such sites show up in Google is a good thing, but it is not up to Google to determine those sites.  Why aren’t the States using Google Search results to go after the offending sites, but instead they are going after Google for displaying sites that Google finds on the public Internet?  If someone has a legitimate reason to have a site in a search result taken down, then take down the site, it will no longer be available and will quickly fall off the Google Search result page.  These Attorneys General are not doing their job, they want Google to do it for them.

This is not that dissimilar to the recent European ‘right to be forgotten’.  There, if someone finds a search result that they disapprove of, they can petition Google to remove that site from the search result.  The offending site is not affected, and in fact the offended party doesn’t go after them, just the search result. It is up to Google to determine which sites are  ‘forgotten’ and which aren’t.  That is not Google’s mission.

Detractors of Google Take Fight to the States – NYTimes.com.