How does Google "remove" entries? Do they just exclude certains pages from results? If so, that's not really a solution since that information is still publicly

How does Google "remove" entries? Do they just exclude certains pages from results? If so, that's not really a solution since that information is still publicly available. It would make much more sense to remove all web pages (from newspapers etc.) containing the actual data, and ideally Google would forget about it as well soon. But then again, that would be a lot of work and it's easier to just take down the gateway. But it's ridiculous.