EU wants Google "right to be forgotten" deletions to apply everywhere At the moment, users can get around the ruling by searching on Google.com, since the rule only applies in Europe on domains such as .co.uk, .fr and .de. But the new advice comes as part of a set of guidelines into the use of public data, released by the European Union today. The detail of the guidelines is expected to be announced later this week. The "right to be forgotten" ruling allows users to ask Google to remove search results about themselves. Google does not remove any content from the web, but simply removes the links. Google has received just under 175,000 requests, covering 600,000 websites, since the ruling came into force in summer. It has approved around 40 per cent of those requests. Google publishes details of the requests - including how many are approved ,where they come from and which sites are affected - as part of its Transparency Report. The use of the global version of Google has long been known to be a way around the ruling, along with searching for details of the articles rather than the names of those involved. Even if users type the .com domain into their address bar, they are most often redirected to the local version of the page. But users can prompt the site to take them to the global domain manually.