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Google Punishes Self for Cloaking
amyrick writes "eWeek is carrying a story about Google's response to March 8th's cloaking accusations. Rather than justify the shady practices as some exception to their rules, Google removed the pages from their indices, and are requiring the pages' maintainers to revise the pages and reapply for indexing. Though the existence of the cloaked pages at all is somewhat questionable, at least Google has responded with integrity and consistency."
"at least Google has responded with integrity and consistency." Or maybe they got tired of Slashdot readers bashing them for underhanded business practices? In all honesty though, I'm glad to see them rectify this.
Please move along. -Google
It's nice to see that Google:
1. Actually tries to follow the "don't be evil" thing.
2. Reads slashdot.
Translation: "We got caught with our pants down."
How is Google punishing anyone? All they're doing is now choosing to follow their own rules.
Wow, and I was afraid Google was going down the Evil slope. Maybe they are just the saccerine of evil. Only 1 calorie, not quite evil enough.
We google whores love the attention. Holaaa
There must be something in it for them!
Check out his comments on the affair which echo the EWeek article, but provide a little more detail.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Apparently the original problem was caused by the Google Search Appliance identifying itself with the string googlebot, similar to the general search sit bot. The support section of the site was setup to return additional keyword information to the internal search appliance and "accidently" returned the same info to the regular googlebot.
Of course, it's nice to hear they're making themselves fix it before relisting themselves.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Everyone knows they only de-cloak just before attacking...
you would think that these google stories would grow old but they just keep coming. It's just a little ridiculous. At first it was just major product (service) announcements and now it's like a play-by-play of google's activity.
"Term Stuffing"? It didn't look like the terms used on that page were chosen to pop up in a search engine. They looked to me much more like the terms that any marketing department would use to make a product seem good/useful/whatever. Are we going to ban marketing departments from using common positive words now?
My Systems
They're just covering their asses from potential bad press.
Oh, wicked, wicked Google. Oh, it is a naughty business and it must pay the penalty, and here in /., we have but one punishment for setting cloaking: you must tie it down on a bed and spank it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is a good business method, I hope we see others mimic it. Perhaps Microsoft will comply and remove all security holes from their operating system, then require the exploiters to revise their viruses and reapply for infecting.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
That's pretty impressive actually... Rather than just saying they can do whatever they want since it's their stuff, they're sticking to, and enforcing, their own (external) policies. I think this shows integrity as a company.
When I broke the law the "punishment" was try again and do it right this time.
Interesting...A company as huge as Google trying to maintain its squeeky clean company reputation (and hence respect of us nerds) through such meticulous work and attention to its userbase.
:)
Maybe Google's return to its old informal self is on the cards?
What a publicity stunt!
More people saw those damn pages from the hoopla over this thing than the cloaking ever caused.
Why don't they just buy a Google Ad?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Translation - you may now resume your baseless fanboy fawning over Google now.
Remember that Google knows quite a lot about you from what you query. They can trivially map all your Google queries back to a single person/entity/IP address. Is it good that any company knows that much information about you? And what will they do with this information? Hmmmm....
Prior art.
'Nuff said.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Yet again, google shows what a unique entity they are. Maybe they're actually serious about their business motto?
You only get that part if you're googlebot; it's cloaked from the rest of us.
A lot of search engines would have just hardcoded their own result at or near the number one spot. Not trying to be a Google fanboy, but you gotta give them credit for at least cheating the hard way.
I Want To Believe
They don't like it when people Google bomb and if they do it themselves, they'll just be hypocrites. It doesn't matter that they own their search service, no one likes a hypocrite who lectures "do as I say, not as I do."
People just naturally grow contemptuous of rules that are made by someone who says that they don't apply to them. The government has found that out the hard way when it exempts itself from the Constitution of all things when going after such "vermin" as drug dealers.
Leading by example is the only way to lead.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Anyone Remember ST:TNG episode "Pegasus" Where Starfleet had a Phased Cloaking device. Well the Federation(Capt. Picard) Came clean with the Romulans and acknowledged that They broke the no cloak Treaty. I bet some higher-ups at Google watched that same episode!
> Though the existence of the cloaked pages at all is somewhat questionable, at least Google has responded with integrity and consistency.
Don't they know this is the internet?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Damn! Does this mean I have to update my websites too?
This slashdot-related signature is a stub. You can help kihjin by expanding it.
...
Awww... We still love you.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Why is it that Google is viewed as the 'red dress robot' from Galactica ?
You know, - they do something questionable, everyone goes 'tsk, tsk', but secretly wish that they were doing something naughty to them ?
Did they remove all the pages...
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If Microsoft pulled this same stunt with their new search engine this entire crowd (or most) would be jumping all over them for being evil.
Google gets the Slashdot "Get out of jail free" card.
Though the existence of the cloaked pages at all is somewhat questionable, at least Google has responded with integrity and consistency.
Sounds like the fanboys aro out in force again, but this time on the main page.
Google is God, whos with me?
Or perhaps this one?
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
From Dictionary.com:
egime also régime Pronunciation Key (r-zhm, r-)
n.
1.
1. A form of government: a fascist regime.
2. A government in power; administration: suffered under the new regime.
2. A prevailing social system or pattern.
3. The period during which a particular administration or system prevails.
4. A regulated system, as of diet and exercise; a regimen.
So, you CAN call the Bush Administration a Regime, as it fits not one but two of these definitions. It says nothing about being a good or evil regime, you'll note.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
'Cause, as we all know, Slashdot was the only news-reposting site to cover this story, so if Google noticed any criticisms at all, it had to come from here. A site such as, say, searchenginewatch.com, would never have mentioned it.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
"Though the existence of the cloaked pages at all is somewhat questionable, at least Google has responded with integrity and consistency."
Wow, they removed the pages that were discovered. How many more are there and have these been cleaned up as well?
...as critical thinking. Didn't anyone see this posting from the March 8 comments?
Don't you have someone you'd die for?
Google's main concern is their shareholders now. So when something like this goes public and their image is at stake... they act.
Google was just playing Klingon to Microsoft's Borg...
Don't get me wrong, I like both Google and Slashdot but with all these google stories popping up these last couple of days makes me feel like I've been caught between the two of them on a first date. I'm trying to keep a straight face, but it's hard to do when they are playing a mean game of footsie, shaking the table all about.
<sarcasm>Slashdot was the only news-reposting site to cover this story</sarcasm>
Slashdot is a state of mind
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Bill Gates was spotted on the Microsoft campus in Redmond bent over, pants around his ankles, spanking himself vigorously.
Insert witty sig here.
Once they were CAUGHT!!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You must be new here...
Now, take this information along with the earlier issue of the new customization on the news.google.com site, which frequently lists news sites that require registration.
Those sites serve out different content for the Googlebot than they do for my browser, but obviously Google "makes an exception" in their case.
And that would be fine by me, if I have the option to disable reporting of such sites in my news.google.com cookie.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Where are all the people who said Google was "just a corporation" from yesterday?
I hate Halo and GTA. Sue me.
Translation: "We got caught with our pants down."
Only if you're not using strict or moderate filtering.
Do no evil.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
<Ad by Goooooooogle>
All Google -- All the time.
Software Wars
When Google becomes un-useful to me, I'll find another search method. Right now, I expect to use more keywords and narrow my searches down with phrases.
It just doesn't bother me, right now. Maybe it will in the future, and then I'll go somewhere else.
This kind of thing happens once in a while. When you have 100's of folks working on a system, sometimes things slip through that are local optimums that don't look so good from a global level.
Don't attribute inadvertent slip-ups to some nefarious high level strategy. Even when the culprit is Google or god forbid, Micro$oft.
People use the term to mean definition #1. The people referred to in the sig aren't using it to describe "a prevailing social system or pattern" or "a regulated system."
Google has made a policy: "We're not evil. That's our corporate policy. We're not evil."
From what I can tell, people respond to this policy in one of two ways:
Now, the popular sentiment seems to be sympathetic here.
However, it's not as sympathetic as it might be.
I believe the answer is in the psychology of the Google Detractors. My personal belief is that the detractors are experiencing a cognitive dissonance. This is the where you have two ideas in front of you, and they seem to be contradictory.
Some possible cognitive dissonances:
There are likely other cognitive dissonances that move people to detract from Google, despite it's stellar record.
Why are we talking about the motives of complaint here, rather than addressing the complaints themselves? Because, to a Google supporter (such as myself,) the complaints are trivially addressed. This is evidenced by the various "Move along, folks, nothing to see here." Since the complaints will not go away once answered, we are left with wondering what is causing the complaints in the first place.
This is like trying to kill the ghost-generator in Gauntlet, rather than just focusing on the ghosts themselves. You can lob an axe and kill a ghost with ease; It's just that there's so many of them.
I don't believe we can change the root causes of the cognitive dissonance: Anti-corporate culture, and True Neutrality, to name two.
Thus we find ourselves in a natural tension zone, of continual evaluation.
But there is room for strategy and motion within the tension. That is, forces on different sides can make plays that shift the substantially shift the weight of the tension play.
Please excuse my thinking out loud.
The technical or editorial teams setup the rules of the game for how their site will behave and how users will interact with the site; and then the business or sales team makes some decision without consulting the techs or editors.
Not knowing doesn't excuse the adwords team -- they should've consulted the Google.com team before they tried to "improve their rankings on Google." I just think it's more complicated than the idea of the borg-mentality: that all actions by different parts of the company were universally sanctioned by every employee of the company.
... I'll continue to use google over MSN Search. Just kinda gives me a warm fuzzy feeling when they do something like this.
Or it could be that I'm exactly the 'consumer' they aimed this at.
Either way, my homepage will remain www.google.co.uk!!!
I'm thinking that beat the 'fire while cloaked' version by quite a piece....
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
It's sad that in today's world a company -- admitting the obvious after it has been caught -- merits praise. Google's response only makes me think less of the company. We're talking degrees of evil. Sure, other companies are "super evil," but Google has demonstrated this week that it is no saint.
"Though the existence of the cloaked pages at all is somewhat questionable, at least Google has responded with integrity and consistency."
/. at all is somewhat questionable, I have decided to say, "WTF?"
Though the existance of
The big deal is that when Greg Duffy published how to trick Google Print into giving you the full text of books, Google responded by erasing GregDuffy.com from the index for a while. That's shady.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Microsoft: We will do no evil! Well.. maybe we will, but we will only do it if it's legal! Err -some of the time anyway...
"Regime" means "form of government." A regime can be fascist, democratic, monarchist, whatever, and still be a "regime". So it is perfectly reasonable to talk about the Bush regime, the Allawi regime, the Castro regime, whatever; it has nothing to do with how repressive it is (or isn't).
Deep philosophical discussions about relativism and universal morality aside. The meaning of "evil" can have different meanings in different contexts. Google is in the game of trying to figure out a way to rank and display web pages. It is totally appropriate for Google to label practices as good, bad and evil. Good practices would be those that help the ranking process. Bad practices are those that get in the way (like putting a session id in a query string). Evil practices would be those intentionally designed to influence page rank or otherwise mislead the public.
Google's philosophy is based on and ideal of natural linking. They assume that all links appear on the web naturally. Anything that artificially creates links to influence google is a form of SE spam...evil.
The big problem is that Google's definition of evil is different from most web masters. My definition is that whatever properly represents my site in the search engine is good. For example, I have pages with a disclaimer on the page. The pages show up well for searches containing the words of the disclaimer, it does not show up well for the content of the site. I would love to simply not show that information to a Google search, but such action falls in Google's definition of "evil." Even though, I think the change would improve the quality of Google's listing.
There is, of course, a great deal of what could be described as true SE evil in the world. There are billions of web pages with duplicate or false content produced with the soul intent of manipulating Google results. A web master might randomly generate millions of pages with false key words for Google to injest. They then display whatever misleading media message they want to stuff down the gullets of Internet users.
So, we have a world where Google defines anything that varies from their ideal of natural linking as evil. We have webmasters who think greater control over their representation in Google would be good for the public. They get cast as evil. Finally, we have Spammers with a truly evil intent of misleading people by filling the internet with useless white noise. It is an interesting electronic study of human nature.
I'm fairly sure that *something* was going on ... make sure that you take a look at all of the posts on the site, particularly the one that questions the "DNS" claim.
... magically around the time the article was posted (but not exactly the time) an 8 day gap appears. During this time, thousands of people were successfully visiting my site (with no DNS errors), including Yahoo's and MSN's spider (also in the directory). Maybe Google was having a localized DNS problem. Who knows?
You are right, though, I can't say with 100% confidence that they did anything underhanded.
Check out some snippets of my log [gregduffy.com] for the major spiders.
Googlebot visited every few days with gaps of at most a couple of days
My listing on Google reappeared soon after they 1) took down Google Print results from the main search page, 2) make a trivial patch to use dynamic stopwords on page numbers (doesn't fix the main problem), and 3) put Google print back in the main search results.
I dunno what happened. I don't want to put on the tinfoil hat, but it is still really weird. Again, that's the only claim I'm making: It's really weird.
This is like trying to kill the ghost-generator in Gauntlet, rather than just focusing on the ghosts themselves. You can lob an axe and kill a ghost with ease; It's just that there's so many of them.
I love being of the generation that can reference the generators in Gauntlet and be perfectly well-understood among my peers.
But just to be clear -- this *must* be a reference to a real 1980s Gauntlet, not to any of the 1990s pretenders.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
You know, it's just a minor "url"-ification, just like the Harvard M.B.A.s-not-to-be who changed the text of the pointer URL to see if they were going to receive acceptance letters or not. It's the server side that had the problem, accepting malformed or un-authorized requests.
That's as bad as passing your login and password as cleartext on the URL request, isn't it?
k say chalet
here's a pic of the original google 'server farm'
/ /g oogle.stanford.edu/mvc-043f.jpg
http://web.archive.org/web/19980502040406/http:
---
I type this every time.
Don't mind the mess it's just cannon fodder until the SCO saga picks up again.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Love,
bonch (aka rd_syringe aka Overly Critical Guy)
A site such as, say, searchenginewatch.com, would never have mentioned it.
FYI: here and here, actually... :)
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
The first truly evil entities known as corporations started about 1886. It's 2005 now. Well, according to my understanding of history it was closer to 1400, or 1200 where the first corporations started, but we'll assume you're source is right. It's been 119 years; one corporation out of 119 years of evil that's specifically designed as a dialectical result of anti-corporatism meshed with american capitalist idealism, and need.
It raises questions with the axiom "All corporations are evil", and possibly proves the axiom false, but the axiom still is useful in the vast majority of cases; that this corporation might be an exception is not that remarkable. We've had 140, or if my sense of history is right, well over 800 years in order to get to the point where a not-evil corporation is even *conceivable*.
Mabye we need more companies like google. Direct competitors. Google-alikes in other markets. Imagine McGoogle. Walmoogle. ExonMoogle. I think in a world where corporations are growing more and more powerful, and where concentration of power is increasing, a corporation that is designed from the ground up to A) not be evil and B) serve customers in simple, widely appealing, easy to understand ways that do not demean or take pleasure in the exploitation and objectification(word?) of their workers---is a refreshing turn of events.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
In further explanation, the Google spokesman stated, "The Romulans responsible for this have been fired."
Chris Mattern
Google computes PageRank partly by counting the number of pages pointing in to yours. It may be that they could throw a web page you suggest into the mix, but unless somebody else acknowledges it first, it come up with a very low score. So it may simply not come up in their algorithm if they haven't spidered to it.
That theory may be dumb; if you've got a page with a highly distinctive keyword on it, it should come up when you type in that keyword no matter what.
From looking at the sample text from the two sites (the page, and Google's cache of it), it looks like they're pretty clearly doing what's alleged.
What I don't understand is why they're doing it that way. Have there not been a few cases before where Google admitted the ability to manually boost the rank of sites? (Unfortuantely, specific details are escaping me at the moment... But I swear this has been covered here.)
Why doesn't Google simply make itself the first match? This just seems like a convoluted, Rube Goldberg hack: have Google's webpage return something different if Google views it, so that Google will rank Google's page more highly.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Saddam is most infamous for his ethnic cleansings with death counts estimated in the _millions_. Many who have died in the Iraq war are Saddam loyalists who either participated or supported these ethnic cleansings. Yes, there were some innocent deaths, and US soldier deaths, but it doesn't even come close to the millions that were killed under Saddams rule.
I think the most important things to note are:
1. If this was a legitimate mistake, that's that; they corrected it, and hence they're not evil.
2. If it wasn't a legitimate mistake, and they were intentionally spamming their own search, that should quell concerns that their searches are evilly biased in general, since they would have instead used such an internal, "evil" search boost. Hence they're not evil enough to have biased searches.
Google: Stop! Who would PageRank must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see.
Launcelot: Ask me the questions, Google. I am not afraid.
Google: What... is your name?
Launcelot: My name is 'Sir Launcelot of Camelot'.
Google: What... is your quest?
Launcelot: To Rank High.
Google: What... is your favourite colour?
Launcelot: Blue.
Google: Right. Off you go.
Launcelot: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.
Robin: That's easy!
Google: Stop! Who approacheth the PageRank must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see.
Robin: Ask me the questions, Google. I'm not afraid.
Google: What... is your name?
Robin: 'Sir Robin of Camelot'.
Google: What... is your quest?
Robin: To Rank High.
Google: What... is the capital of Assyria?
[pause]
Robin: I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!
Google: Stop! What... is your name?
Galahad: 'Sir Galahad of Camelot'.
Google: What... is your quest?
Galahad: To Rank High.
Google: What... is your favourite colour?
Galahad: Blue. No, yel-- auuuuuuuugh!
Google: Hee hee heh. Stop! What... is your name?
eWeek: It is 'eWeek', Paper of Criticism.
Google: What... is your quest?
eWeek: To Rank High.
Google: What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
eWeek: What do you mean? An African or European swallow?
Google: Huh? I-- I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
On the other hand, I don't think Google was doing this on purpose. They're hiring lots of new people and maybe one of them came from a company that did this and he thought it was standard practice, so he used it on his first assignment on his first day. GoogleGuy posted that they were fixing it, but now it seems they are going to make their own people go through the same hoops any other site would have to. Way to go, Google!
Google is not a government entity.
It makes no pretense that its indexing method treats all web sites equally.
If it did, it could be sued/complained about to state attorney general for all un-indexed web sites.
Dr. Evil: You're not quite evil enough. You're semi-evil. You're quasi-evil. You're the margarine of evil. You're the Diet Coke of evil, just one calorie, not evil enough.: www.garnersclassics.com/qaustin2.htm+%22the+diet-c oke+of+evil%22+austin+powers&hl=en&start=1&client= firefox-a
http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:u-XEP57XHtMJ
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
As mentioned when the first story was posted,
Again, according to robots.txt the only engine which should have been indexing these pages is Google itself. Any non-Google spider would only have indexed these pages if it were disobeying robots.txt in the first place.
Many have pointed out that Google was only "probably" trying to fix the page's ranking with respect to their own search results. I would say that this seems pretty damned certain, as they've excluded these pages from ALL OTHER WELL-BEHAVED ENGINES via the standard mechanism.
Props to the original poster -- I just wish talksinmaths had quoted the original post for those too busy to click the link. I think it's unfair to act like Google was trying to mess up search results for other engines when these other engines shouldn't be indexing those pages in the first place.