Is Google’s omnipresence imprinted so strong in our collective mind that many people put the equation sign between Google and the Internet? Possibly, but Google itself still knows the difference.

In an interesting post on his blog, Google’s Matt Cutts explains why Google usually won’t remove a webpage from their index, even if someone asks them to. He sums up his (and Google’s) response to such requests:

"Unfortunately there’s not much I can do. The page you pointed out is not spam, and pretty much the only removals (at least in the U.S., which is what I know about) that we do for legal reasons are if a court orders us. We typically say that if person A doesn’t like a webpage B, only removing page B out of Google’s search results doesn’t do any good because webpage B is still there (e.g. it can be found by going to it directly or through other search engines). In that sense, the presence of that page in Google’s index is just reflecting the fact that the page exists on the wider web."

Topics: Google, Reminder, Servers, Presence, Other Search Engines