Thousands ask Google to scrub Web

San Francisco — Google is being swamped with requests from Europeans trying to erase unflattering links to their past from the world's dominant Internet search engine.

Google has received nearly 145 000 requests from people in Europe looking to polish their online reputations, according to numbers the company released Friday. That's an average of more than 1 000 requests a day since late May, when Google began accepting submissions after Europe's highest court ruled that some embarrassing information about people's lives can be scrubbed from search results.

Requests can be made by more than 500 million people living in 32 countries.

The removal requests covered more than 497 000 Web links — Google has removed 42% of them.