Re: To what end?
The measure isn't specific to Google (or even just search engines). In principle, the requester has every right to ask for the original data to be removed, and having third parties like Google get rid of links and caches is secondary.
I believe what makes it weird is that the original copy (say, the article or blog post) may have different legal status than those duplicates and links. I've forgotten the exact terminology, but I believe it's pretty possible for an article to have special protection as journalism, for example, but a search engine's data about that article not to. I'm not sure how much of that is about the nature of the data, versus how it's being used, versus the nature of the company holding it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
