A disgraced football coach and an investment banker involved in the global financial crisis are two of the early successful applicants to evoke the digital world's newly minted "right to be forgotten".

Three major international news groups have received "notice of removal" emails from Google earlier this week explaining several of their articles would no longer be findable via the search engine.

Google has started removing some search results following the court ruling. Credit:Reuters

The action stems from a European Court of Justice ruling in May. It means European citizens can apply to have information on them deleted from search engines on grounds such as "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed”. The links will only be removed from European Google searches.

The three affected new organisations so far, the BBC, The Guardian and The Daily Mail are all based in the United Kingdom. They do not have the right to appeal the decisions, nor have they received explanations as to which articles were blocked.