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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.
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...
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!
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
The problem was that the title of the page (ie that part in head title="...) was changing to contain the "term stuffing" text if the google bot was visiting it.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
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!
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.
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
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.
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.