A third of all right to be forgotten requests were made by UK citizens, Google has revealed.
A total of 146,938 takedown requests have been submitted to the search firm from around Europe in reference to 498,830 web pages, with more than 18,000 of these from the UK, then France and Germany with 29,010 and 25,078, respectively.
The UK requests relate to 63,616 different links and Google has removed around 35 per cent of them - amounting to 18,459. In total, Google has removed41.8 per cent of web pages from its search results.
The right to be forgotten ruling was passed by the European Union Court of Justice after a Spanish citizen requested information relating to an auction notice of his repossessed home be taken down because it infringed his privacy.
Google was the first search engine to announce it would be implementing a form on its site that would allow people to file claims to remove links relating toirrelevant, outdated, or otherwise inappropriate information that could also infringe the privacy of the claimant.
In the UK, Google gives an example of a media professional who asks the company to remove four links to articles "reporting on embarrassing content he posted to the internet." Google didn't remove the articles from search results.
The company did, however, remove links including the personal details of a doctor who was involved in a 'botched procedure'. Three of the pages the doctor complained about were removed because they revealed personal details, but the others are still available online.
The most popular sites for takedown include pages from Facebook (3,353 links removed), Profile Engine (3,299 links removed), YouTube (2,395 links removed), Badoo (2,207 links removed) and Google Groups (1,949 links removed).
The right to be forgotten legislation has seen a significant amount of criticism since it was announced earlier in the year, with many people saying it is promoting a censorship culture on the internet.
