An unscrupulous twist on reputation management. When a Google search turns up negative stories, Europeans can turn to a controversial "right to be forgotten" law. But in the United States, where no such law exists, Americans may try their luck with shifty "reputation management" companies that promise to scrub embarrassing Google (goog, +0.21%) results. While such reputation "experts" have been around for years, one of them appears to have found a sneaky new way to purge Google results using court orders. The scheme, discovered by law professors Eugene Volokh and Paul Levy, relies on filing libel lawsuits against fake defendants, and then telling Google there is a court order to remove the content in question.