Please Google, when we search; avoid all tragedies through history unless we write the word "tragedy" on the search box... oh! and make sure that no search result for a business name returns sad search results; is your duty to help us believe that the whole world is a big happy shopping mall.
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Did you read a different article than I did? Did you read the whole article? Aside from one Nanny Net spokesman, nobody was asking for anything to be hidden. I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask why "accident camp abc" doesn't show grisly pictures, but a more generic "camp abc" does show them, especially when it only started a couple years ago (was somebody hiding that information for Google's first ten years?).
If it were my business that were being torpedoed by search engine capriciousness, I'd raise a stink about it, too, it for no other reason than in hopes it would push the stuff lower in the result stack.
I should follow this up with this: as much as this sucks, and as much as I understand the guy's complaint and don't fault him at all, I don't see how Google can make a special case for him. However, google could look at the general pattern and ask "should we be putting pictures of tragedies up on the first page of results that aren't asking specifically about the tragedy?" That becomes a general algorithm question and not a specific search question.
I don't know enough about Google's internals to know if that kind of semantic information is available, but I trust if anybody could accomplish it, it's them.
I know if I was a parent of a victim of something like Columbine, I wouldn't want pictures of bodies showing up as the first thing 10 years later.
Clearly this guy is someone trying to rationalize an argument against the fact that the search results for his business name can produce negative connotations.
The search engine is not a human being, it haves not capriciousness, and its not capriciousness from their creators neither; they just created an algorithm to give you the most relevant results.
This guy has a rational argument: the algorithm does not show the most relevant results for this search term [1]. Tuning a complex, heuristics-based algorithm by hand is possible. We also know Google does this for specific terms [2]. This guy is asking for such tuning for this specific search term. That's an entirely reasonable request. You may equally reasonably argue that Google should not grant him this request. If this discussion makes 'your blood boil', you may need to take some anger management classes. This is not an issue that should make your blood boil.
[1] Assuming that most people searching for this camping actually want to go camping, which sounds plausible to me.
[2] For instance, the term 'suicide' was rigged to return results preventing suicide.
Yep, my blood is boiling...