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."
"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.
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...
"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
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.
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
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
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
...
Awww... We still love you.
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.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
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.
'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?
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
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
<Ad by Goooooooogle>
All Google -- All the time.
Software Wars
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!!!
more like deja vu apparently.
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.
"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.
Instead the listing title showed a meaningless garble of phrases - "traffic estimate, traffic estimator, traffic tool, estimate traffic, blah blah blah". To me, this certainly looks like an unintended, "inadvertent" result.
I for one am perfectly willing to believe Google's claim that "We inadvertently showed additional information on product support pages to both Google's site search crawler and Google's main web crawler." Why shouldn't I? There are honest people left in the world. Are honest mistakes not allowed any more?
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.