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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
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.
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?
How is Google punishing anyone? All they're doing is now choosing to follow their own rules.
didnt you RTFA?
the employees responsible will be held in public stockades in front of the Google building for 3 days while rotten fruit will be available for the public to hurl at them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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!
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.
'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)
All I am admiring is this superb bit of free PR they just pulled off. Clever bastards!
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.
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.
It occurs to me, with like 100+ million sites spidered that they might have never noticed it before? Once pointed out, they did something.
-What have you contributed lately?