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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
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.
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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.
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
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.
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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!
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.
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)
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!
"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's public perception is one of integrity, and that it one big reason people like them.
I like Google because their homepage isn't littered with ads and other junk. I was initially attracted to them becasue of their simplicity - a nearly blank webpage with one single graphic and a few links to other features. I like how MSN copied their style.In addition, many of my friends and family prefer Google over anything else because on a dial up connection, you don't need to wait 10 minutes for a whole page of graphics and banner ads to appear. I am more likely to click on Google's text ads in the search results because they're usually not obnoxious.
This makes me think of why I like NPR over other radio stations - their 'ads' are usually spoken in a normal tone. It's one person saying "This show paid for in part by Chrysler" or whatever company, as opposed to some silly script with obnoxious voices. I can even tolerate some of the ads on the Howard Stern show - those that are read by Mr. Stern himself.
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.