You don't have to be a master at corporate doublespeak to know Google is unhappy with the European Court of Justice decision on the right to be forgotten.

The company has been quite open about its disappointment.

While privacy advocates celebrated the decision, search engines were counting the cost of the burden it would place on them to comply with an expected deluge of requests to remove links. And those backing free speech online talked of European censorship.

The right to be forgotten could be attractive to people falsely accused – for example, a Dublin student wrongly named as a taxi fare dodger in a YouTube clip had to go to court to clear his name.

Examples of the type of requests Google has received include a former politician looking to be re-elected who wanted links to his behaviour while in office taken down, a man convicted of possessing child pornography sought the removal of links to his conviction, and a GP who had negative reviews published online wants those taken down. It lived up to the fears of critics of the decision.

The company has enabled those with an issue to submit a request to remove it. But it’s not as straightforward as simply asking; Google plans to vet requests before making a decision, and “public interest” may trump the right to privacy.

“When evaluating your request,” says its online form, “we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information – for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials,” it says.

Decisions can always be taken to local data-protection authorities for a more official view on the matter.

But the ruling only applies to links on European search engines, so users simply have to switch to Google’s main dot-com homepage to get the full results.