The Google ruling by the European Court of Justice stinks

Yes, the ECJ has got it badly wrong.

Google stinks, too, for its tax avoidance tactics in the UK.

But, along with the world wide web, search engines in general, and I guess Google in particular, have transformed our access to information and made it so much easier to find out about people, companies, organisations, and governments and what they've been up to. As such they are agents of transparency and a Good Thing.

Pre-digital, a news item or document in the public domain might be forgotten and lost unless someone was prepared to spend hours or days looking for it manually in source material, possibly on microfilm, or via an index of some kind if the publisher or another body had found fit to invest in one.

Then back in the 1970s we had computers to help but digital storage was expensive and storage of text was rare. You would only be able to store a representation of a document (an abstract and meta data such as author, keywords, index terms). Searching the meta data was fine, like searching any database, but parsing the abstract text was slow. To facilitate searching, text retrieval systems were developed which used an inverted index: a record of each word in the abstract, where it was, and its context.

Then storage became cheaper, the world wide web happened, and text retrieval systems morphed into search engines.The expectation is now that you can search anywhere in the text of those news items, documents, and pages that are on the world wide web.

Except that now us Europeans, just like in China and several other countries where governments like to control what their citizens can read, will no longer be able to locate material deemed undesirable, albeit by individuals and organisations rather than governments.

Yes - people need protection against abuse and threats made over the web, but the ECJ seems to have confused this circumstance with fact and information already in the public domain. The ruling will enable those convicted of all manner of crime: fraud, child abuse, rape, murder etc to effectively airbrush their actions out of history. Thanks a bunch!

The source material is not effected: it is legal to publish this on the web. So how can an index to that material be deemed illegal? All Google is doing is processing the text out there on web servers and creating a searchable inverted index of the words in the text.

What's more, search engines based outside Europe won't be subject to these restrictions. Perhaps a serious rival to Google without a base in Europe, will now emerge? I hope so.

Ironically Mario Costeja González, who is responsible for the case which lead to this ruling, will now always be known as the bloke whose home was repossessed in 1998, the opposite of what he intended. Serves him right.