This might be true before the plaintiff contacted Google, but once contacted by the plaintiff the situation might be more like: I know that "Bob says Joe is a

This might be true before the plaintiff contacted Google, but once contacted by the plaintiff the situation might be more like: I know that "Bob says Joe is a pedophile" and "Joe says that he is not a pedophile". It is factually true for you to continue to say that "Bob says that Joe is a pedophile", but if that's ALL that your saying, then morally you're lying by omission. It is of course an interesting question of how to boil this situation down to the reality of how a search engine works and displays results, but the general point stands that your presented situation isn't really representative of the ruling. Oh, also in this specific case the claim wasn't that Joe is a pedophile, it's that Joe was a convicted pedophile, which if you want to poke at the morality of, would push Google into a even more precarious position, since that's harder fact. If Joe brings proof that he was never a convicted pedophile, then you repeating that "Bob says that Joe is a convicted pedophile" with no qualifiers is barely distinguishable from saying "Joe is a pedophile" from a moral standpoint.