What about their search engine?

I knew someone who worked as a "reputation hit man". I don't know what his rate is today, but back in the 2000s, he would, for $500, impersonate and defame a person all over the internet. Most of his clients were corporate executives trying to take out competitors for promotions. He may be out of that business, but it still exists and the practice is widespread.

Google knows about this problem, and in the EU, there is a right to be forgotten. If you're American, though, there could be "Google dirt" about you or about someone with the same first and last name, keeping you from getting decent jobs, and you probably wouldn't even know.

That's why I beat the reputation hitmen to the punch and assassinate my own character on the Internet. Nobody gets to make an ass of me except for me :)

The US has defamation laws that you might be able to leverage.

This seems to only be very tangentially related to google, what about other search engines or the websites that host the content?

Damages for defamation are hard to prove.

If someone with a million followers says on Twitter, "I don't like Bob", then Bob is never going to get hired anywhere, but there's no legal case. Indeed, the person voicing the opinion didn't break any laws or do anything wrong--the problem, rather, is with employers who refuse to hire anyone remotely controversial (and who, in doing so, implement "cancel culture", although it's always been the left that is most viciously cancelled).

Free speech is important, but we need to regulate the shit out of search engines and employers in order to protect people from unearned reputation damage.

Employers should ban those providing them with this info. It is these people that are and should be controversial. If your company is connected to them and uses their services, it should be made public. Behavior will change yesterday. Imagine you are connected to people cancelling other on internet rumors you cannot verify. You can search for a new country immediately and especially the professional world would not want to associate with you. Applying the same rules would do quite a bit although companies above a certain size only care for certain types of reputational costs.

>we need to regulate the shit out of search engines and employers in order to protect people from unearned reputation damage.

No we don't, in fact not fixing this provides plausible deniability which in many cases is more valuable.

Plausible deniability for whom? Employers? Which side are you on?

If we don't regulate employers and the decisions they make, people will continue being denied jobs for stupid reasons.

In the ongoing war against fascism, moderation is no virtue and extremity is no vice.

If being denied jobs is the main concern it's much more effective to change your legal name to one that is slightly more common vs. try to scrub the internet of information.

If you somehow succeed in regulating google, I as an employer will simply search for your name using Baidu, Yandex, or Naver. Good luck getting all of them to play along with your particular censorship ask.

That's why it's important to regulate employers even more tightly than search engines.

I'd support tightly regulating those that advocate for regulations.