Google has received more than 70,000 requests to remove links since May, following the "right to be forgotten" ruling from the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Now it's offering a little more detail on how it plans to handle all those requests.

David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, wrote an article in The Guardian this week panning the ruling, but pledging to comply with it nonetheless. To that end, Google has set up a council of independent advisors to help review the requests.

Drummond wrote in the article:

When it comes to determining what's in the public interest, we're taking into account a number of factors. These include whether the information relates to a politician, celebrity or other public figure; if the material comes from a reputable news source, and how recent it is; whether it involves political speech; questions of professional conduct that might be relevant to consumers; the involvement of criminal convictions that are not yet "spent"; and if the information is being published by a government. But these will always be difficult and debatable judgments.

The ECJ ruled in May that a search engine like Google has a responsibility to remove links to irrelevant and outdated information that is not in the public interest if requested to do so. Google set off some alarms among publishers in the UK earlier this month when it notified them it would be removing several articles from search results as a result of the ruling.

Drummond appeared to acknowledge the uproar in the article and admit mistakes were made. "Of course, only two months in our process is still very much a work in progress," he wrote. "It's why we incorrectly removed links to some articles last week (they've since been reinstated)."

In a separate announcement, Google revealed the members of its advisory committee, which include Drummond, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Oxford ethics professor Luciano Floridi and German parliament member Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger.

"The advisory council will hold consultations in Europe this fall, which we intend to stream live and record," Google noted in a statement on its website. "After the consultations the council will publish its findings, which we hope will help inform our evolving policies in this area."