> If I'm Google I'd just stop indexing this site after the ruling and also talk to my competitors and suggest they do the same because it's bad for them. Seems like they index it but downweight already.

That’s what they refused to do after losing the previous case on appeal. That means they no longer have any way to claim they didn’t know about it, since they spent large sums of money fighting it in court.

I get that and I'd accept the ruling (going to the highest possible court because this is kind of important for them). I'd just use it as a good opportunity to de-index a troubling site without any of the potential legal issues that could come with that (unfairly discriminating against said site or whatever).

I think the underlying issue is that Google strenuously avoids taking responsibility for their services. This kind of thing could be handled quickly by a modest customer service group but they don’t want to set the precedent that they do that sort of thing short of a lawsuit.

The auto-complete is of Google's own making. They built and added it, they can improve or remove it. There's no reason to assume an automated prompt has to repeat defamatory or deceitful statements just because they appear somewhere online.