Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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?
Don't count your chickens before they hatch. It is still a young company, and money is still the prime objective. Remember: Bill Gates is one of the largest constributor to non-profit organizations. Makes him and Microsoft part of the "good guys, Inc.", doesn't it? Oh wait.. they're mostly _his_ non profits. hmmm.
I'll reserve judgement until the cards are face up.
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
What a publicity stunt!
More people saw those damn pages from the hoopla over this thing than the cloaking ever caused.
As far as the slashdot thing goes, well, they do use linux clusters - what would you expect? :-)
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
As a matter of fact, I don't think what they were originally doing was "evil." Once you read their description of it, it does seem legit: the words were there as part of an internal indexing system.
Even if they were purposefully increasing the ranking of their pages on their own engine, I don't consider that such a bad thing.
However, I do feel that google has done the right, "non-evil" thing by promptly responding to this situation and changing it. The company could have pulled out any number of explanations or even ignored the situation entirely. Instead, they took the high road and simply fixed the problem so that everything is legit again.
That's why I think it is an example of them enforcing the "don't be evil" thing. Granted, the "don't be evil" thing has alot to do with PR and corporate image... but I still admire Google for taking the opposite approach to companies like Microsoft.
'Not playing fair' can be interpreted as 'evil' for large amounts of 'not playing fair'.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
It's simple really: the SCO soap opera seems to have come to an end, but Slashdot (or the tech news community in general, for that matter) badly needs one. Google seems to be a good enough replacement -- will they turn evil? Will they manage to stay on top of the competition? And so on. Of course there's really not much to talk about -- despite it being a "company run by geeks," it's still business as usual -- but this has never stopped a reporter, has it? You can turn anything into a small scandal. The signs are everywhere. Google added a weather service? Clearly, it must be a turn to evil. The same for this story, and all numerous stories that are yet to come.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
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.
Google also knows that part of business is public perception. Google's public perception is one of integrity, and that it one big reason people like them. Yes they are in a business to make money, but one eventually must ask: If their success is being based on integrity and quality of product, how does bending their own rules affect them and their business in relation to public perception.
'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)
Google didn't break any laws, just their own rules. They are punishing their employees with the same sanctions they use against anyone else. I think that's pretty cool, and I wish we (as a community) showed as much consistency when trying corporate criminals and celebrities as Google has shown here.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
All I am admiring is this superb bit of free PR they just pulled off. Clever bastards!
Once they were CAUGHT!!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
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.
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.
Every other comment on Slashdot seems to comprise one of you Capitalist gurus saying "X is in the business of making money" by way of answer to anything from customer complaints to Congressional displeasure. And you don't say it as an excuse either, but with some sort of righteous triumph. This argument won't wash.
Think about this: If Google is "in the business of making money", not in the business of helping people "find things on the internet", then what are they bothering with all that search engine nonsense for? Wouldn't their duty be to rob and plunder, as the directest route to the cash? How can they justify wasting time on any method less efficient or, God forbid, helpful to others? This is how the argument by such as you comes to a logical conclusion: The truly necessary and moral act is financial rape.
Ridiculous.
If a normal site was caught using cloaking or other tricks they would be not only dropped from the Google index but would be "banned".
ie: They would be given a PageRank of 0 and their pages would not show up in searches for 6 months to 2 years.
If Google was really playing by the same rules they apply to everyone else, they'd ban these pages too. Instead, I bet the pages show up in a couple of days.
If so, this is really just a PR move on their part. Nothing to do with how they really treat other sites.
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.