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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.