HURBAIN v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT 246. Secondly, with regard to delisting by search engines, it is apparent from the documents in the file that the applicant argued before the Court of Appeal that the search engines alone were competent to deal with G.’s request and that the latter had erroneously directed his action against the applicant. The applicant added that the legal department of Le Soir had in fact contacted Google with a view to delisting but had received no reply. However, that argument was dismissed by the Court of Appeal, which observed that the indexing of the article by the search engines was only possible because the article was present in the newspaper’s database in non-anonymised form and without any noindex tag. In the Court of Appeal’s view, G. was therefore entitled to bring his action against the news publisher alone with a view to having the article concerning him anonymised so that it no longer appeared in the list of results obtained following a search based on his first name and surname (see paragraph 27 above). 247. Thirdly, the alternative referred to by G. in the proceedings before the Court of First Instance, consisting of the de-indexing of the article in the internal search engine by the newspaper’s publisher, was not examined by that court, in view of the fact that the latter had already allowed the main request for anonymisation of the article. Likewise, it was not examined by the Liège Court of Appeal, since the applicant had not submitted any request to that effect and since G., in his summarised observations, had requested that the first-instance judgment be upheld (see paragraph 24 above). However, it is worth noting that in the court proceedings the applicant opposed de-indexing by external search engines, arguing that noindex tags were technical tools that were liable to lead to problems on the website concerned and that the search engine operators made the use of such tags subject to the opening of a user account (see paragraph 23 above). 248. Regard being had to the procedural framework of the dispute and in particular to the restrictions imposed by the disposition principle in civil matters under Belgian law (see paragraphs 56-57 above), the Court considers at the outset that the courts cannot be criticised for confining their examination to the admissibility and merits of G.’s main claim – for anonymisation of the article – which they ultimately allowed. 249. Thus, the Liège Court of Appeal found that the most effective means of protecting G.’s privacy without interfering to a disproportionate extent with the applicant’s freedom of expression was to anonymise the article on the website of Le Soir by replacing G.’s first name and surname with the letter X. In that connection, the Court has previously held that anonymisation is less detrimental to freedom of expression than the removal of an entire article (see M.L. and W.W. v. Germany, cited above, § 105). It notes that anonymisation constitutes a particular means of altering archived material in that it concerns only the first name and surname of the person concerned and does not otherwise affect the content of the information conveyed. 82