It was a year ago Wednesday that the European Court of Justice ruled that search engines must remove links from their search results if the content rendered in those URLs is deemed "inadequate" and "irrelevant."

Google, which has about a 90 percent market share in Europe, has rejected removing 59 percent of the URLs it has been asked to take down, according to Google's latest report on the issue.

Google says it has removed 322,601 links from its search results. It has rejected taking down 457,958 URLs.

The figures underscore that the ruling leaves Google and other search engines wide discretion when it comes to abiding by removal requests. According to Google:

In evaluating a request, we will look at whether the results include outdated or inaccurate information about the person. We’ll also weigh whether or not there’s a public interest in the information remaining in our search results—for example, if it relates to financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions or your public conduct as a government official (elected or unelected). Our removals team has to look at each page individually and base decisions on the limited context provided by the requestor and the information on the webpage. Is it a news story? Does it relate to a criminal charge that resulted in a later conviction or was dismissed?

Last year, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales said the right-to-be-forgotten ruling grants search engines the ability to be history's "arbiter." Google said in the decision's immediate aftermath that it was "a disappointing ruling for search engines and online publishers in general."

Google says the top sites where it removed search results included Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Google provided some examples of requests it refused, without naming names.

"A high-ranking public official asked us to remove recent articles discussing a decades-old criminal conviction," Google said of a request in Hungary. "We did not remove the articles from search results."

"A prominent business person asked us to remove articles about his lawsuit against a newspaper," Google said of a request in Poland. "We did not remove the articles from search results."

"A priest convicted for possession of child sexual abuse imagery asked us to remove articles reporting on his sentence and banishment from the church," Google said of a request in France. "We did not remove the pages from search results."

In an opposite example, The Mountain View, California-based search giant noted a takedown request from Belgium.

"An individual who was convicted of a serious crime in the last five years but whose conviction was quashed on appeal asked us to remove an article about the incident. We removed the page from search results for the individual's name," Google said.