In May, a European court told Google it must assist people in cleaning up their online reputations by ruling that there is a “right to be forgotten.”

Google’s efforts to comply with that decision moved a step forward this week, as several British news organizations, including the BBC and The Guardian, announced that they had been notified that certain articles would no longer appear in search results because a complaint had been filed.

By Thursday, a frenzy had erupted over perceived censorship and compromising media freedom, while European regulators and the news outlets themselves complained that Google’s compliance with the European court ruling employed too broad a brush.

That deletions from Google’s search results could cause such a stir — after all, the articles continue to appear on the websites that published them, and can still be easily found if a searcher sidesteps the European versions of Google and uses the United States version, Google.com — speaks to the vast influence of this particular search engine. By some estimates, Google has about an 85 percent share of search traffic in Europe. In North America, that figure stands at less than 70 percent.