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Google Relists Operation Clambake
DarkZero writes: "After almost every tech site and individual geek banded together to either carry the story about Google's delisting of Operation Clambake or flat-out protest it, Google has apparently relisted Xenu.net. Searches for 'xenu' and 'scientology' list Operation Clambake as the first and fourth results, respectively. The search for "scientology" also lists a story from C|Net about Google delisting Operation Clambake, as well as a protest ad from a Kuro5hin reader (oc3)." Update: 03/22 12:52 GMT by M : We jumped the gun. Google only relisted Xenu.net's homepage (where the copyright claims by Scientology were clearly bogus), not the rest of the pages listed in Scientology's DMCA complaint. Some Google sysadmin is getting aggravated because every 20 minutes, another memo from management is coming down telling him to alter the live database.
A success story for the freedom geeks! I couldn't believe the original story when I read it.. I mean do we give people the power to remove any and all criticism from the web (or from the search engines, effectively removing it from the web.) What about the number one search result for "Chevy Avalanche Reviews".. That review is definately not positive, its downright negative. Should we ban it if it makes Chevrolet unhappy?
Starsucks
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Nope, they'll never wake up. Hubbard himself made a rule about this: Never Defend, Always Attack; Scientologists do what Hubbard says. Scientology does things that generate bad press so often that their oposition has developed a name for it: foot bullet. The Scientologists keep shooting themselves in the foot over and over and over, and they can't stop, because Hubbard himself told them to do it.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I was there, too.
With all do respect, you are giving far too negative picture about the meeting. First of all they were very sincere that they didn't handle this in a best possible manner, but in the future they'll try to improve their processes. Their lawyer did first what lawyers normally do in this kind of situations and played on the safe side - he has to worry about the shareholders interest etc. He later noticed that most of CO$'s demands were actually based on trademark-violations, not copyright and based on that Google had an opportunity to restore Xenu.net. The fact that they actually did this on their own is something that we really be happy with. This kind of behaviour is anything but typical in today's corporate world.
And about the ranks, at least to me the message was clear, Google tries to write as good as possible algorithms as possible, which don't require human intervention to filter spamming etc.
V.