Niemela v. Malamas Page 31 much more difficult. Users would have to click on each URL, access the hyperlinked [103] Adoption of the passive instrument test for publication in British Columbia was addressed by Burke J. in Weaver v. Corcoran. The plaintiff in that case sued over reader comments posted about him on a forum hosted by the National Post. After referring to Bunt v. Tilley and Metropolitan as well as Tamiz v. Google Inc., [2013] EWCA Civ 68, Burke J. concluded at para. 282 that the jurisprudence establishes that “some awareness of the nature of the reader post is necessary to meet the test of publication.” She continued at para. 284: Until awareness occurs, whether by internal review or specific complaints that are brought to the attention of the National Post or its columnists, the National Post can be considered to be in a passive instrumental role in the dissemination of the reader postings. It has taken no deliberate action amounting to approval or adoption of the contents of the reader posts. Once the offensive comments were brought to the attention of the defendants, however, if immediate action is not taken to deal with these comments, the defendants would be considered publishers as at that date. [Emphasis added.] [104] In Weaver Burke J. found that it was not reasonable to expect the defendant to pre-vet thousands of visitors’ comments for defamatory content and that the defendant did not therefore have the awareness of the words necessary to meet the test of deliberate publication: at paras. 273, 282. That reasoning applies all the more to a search engine that automatically trawls trillions of webpages in seconds. [105] Added to the sheer volume of material is the obvious difficulty of developing programming to detect and screen out defamatory words. It is apparent that a search engine could not simply be programmed to block every site containing, for example, the words “scam artist” or “steals” without blocking millions of pages of non-defamatory content. [106] Google programs its search algorithm so that it locates URLs likely to relate to a user’s search query. It is not aware of the snippets and hyperlinks produced, nor can it be, realistically. In the words of Eady J. in Metropolitan, Google does not 2015 BCSC 1024 (CanLII) webpage, and examine its contents to determine relevance.