Google De-indexes Talk.Origins, Won't Say Why UPDATED

J. J. Ramsey writes "Talk.Origins is an archive with thousands of pages exposing creationist pseudoscience. Rather mysteriously, Google pulled the plug on its search engine, giving only the vague reason: 'No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines.' This was apparently triggered by a recent cracking of the site that added 'hidden links to non-topical sites,' but Google won't say just what the violations were. Talk.Origins webmaster Wesley R. Elsberry believes that this Google policy harms honest webmasters." From the article: "My mission, whether I liked it or not, was to find and fix whatever problem the [Talk.Origins Archive] might have, with no guidance as to what the problem was and nothing at all about where to start looking... I was extremely lucky. The damage to my site was limited and in the first place that I happened to look. Other honest webmasters might not be so lucky. They may have to undertake an arduous process of vetting pages, essentially having to second-guess the mind of the cracker in trying to locate a problem that Google knows the exact location of." Thanks to an alert reader who sent in Matt's blog posting about how Google handles hacked sites.

Comments

Re:huh?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

That's the Google Groups archive of the talk.origins newsgroup, which is a different animal (an ancestral form, one might say) from the Talk.Origins Archive web site. It was the site that was delisted.

And indeed, as of right now (10:35 PM CST) a Google search for "talk.origins" doesn't show any links at all to the Talk.Origins Archive. In fact, the first link that comes up is to a young-Earth creationist site which claims to offer "intellectually honest responses to the claims of evolutionism's proponents, including--but not limited to--the 'Talk.Origins' newsgroup and the 'Talk.Origins Archive' website."

Conclusions about species competing in crowded niches are left as an exercise to the reader.

Re:ahhh i love it

[scowling]

Except, of course, that "creationist" does not equal "Christian". Talk.origins exposes *all* creationist pseudoscience, from *all* sources.

Google Webmaster Tools

[RockoW]

Google have a set of http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ tools for webmasters. essencially it give out every diagnostic needed to fix your site for Google. Additionaly you have statistics for searches and how GoogleBot see your site. So, you shouldn't blame until you googled for the answer! Searching for "Google index tool" shows up "Google Webmaster Central"...

Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility

[psiclops]

To some extent, part of Google's ability to foil bad website behavior relies on security through obscurity. If Google doesn't tell or hint to anyone how the cheat-detecting algorithms work... well, isn't that good for Google? they dont have to tell anyone how they found the problem, just where. if the webmaster of a site is deliberately trying to cheat google, they already know what pages are in offence anyway.

I could make the argument that since (as you argued) Google is a public company, they have to do what's best for the shareholders by doing what's best for Google. But that is an irrelevant argument, since there's really only three people whose opinions on the subject matter. then why say it.

If Google ever did do something along the lines of what you're proposing, they'd have to put a lot of time & effort into setting up a system that can't be easily abused by link spammers, is easy to use for idiots, etc etc etc. not really, if they already have a system to detect anyway. and it doesnt have to be that easy to use for idiots.

That may be more trouble than it is worth, compared to saying "not our problem, deal with it yourself." on a small scale maybe, but a search engine would want to return the most relevant results. helping sites get relisted would be good for google.

Talkorigins hacked by porn spammers

[Mouth of Sauron]

The site www.talkorigin.org is not the only site to have been de-indexed by Google.

This is a google cache of talkorgins.org showing the porn spam links.

However, I checked on deepx.com and it is *not* a porn site.

From DeepX.com's about page:

XML provides an open and flexible language for the creation, management and exchange of electronic content. Founded in 2000, deepX has an experienced team of consultants and developers, who specialise in the design and development of solutions using XML and the emerging technologies related to XML.

Also, another link shows www.theoi.com and it is *not* a porn site, either:

Here's how THEOI used to look via the Wayback machine.

Theoi.com has been banned by Google (no reason given) and forced to close down as a result. There are no plans to re-establish this site in the future.

wu.edu.gh is Valley View University is a Seventh Day Adventist college in Ghana.

Both deepx.com and wu.edu.gh redirect to porn sites.

Unsurprisingly, wu.edu.gh, theoi.com and deepx.com have been de-indexed by google.

I speculate that all these sites that have been de-indexed were tagged by automated processes.

Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility

[HUADPE]

PG&E is a public company. ComEd is a public company. Verizon is a public company. AT&T is a public company. They're all public utilities. Simply being a publicly traded for profit corporation doesn't mean that you're not a public utility.

These companies were all given special monopoly privileges by the force of government. They can run wires, pipes, and other items through your property without your consent, by law. They are required to provide service to all persons in their scope of operation by law. No such law exists regarding Google Inc. and they are not a utility.

Google emailed this site

[GoogleGuy]

If you dig deeper, it turns out that Google emailed talkorigins.org to alert the site that it had been hacked and was stuffed with rape and animal porn spam. Google's head of webspam has posted a full write-up.

Re:The problem

[NoTheory]

Er... People seem to have some misconceptions about Talk.Origins. The point of Talk.Origins is to catalogue the arguments that Creationists make, and the appropriate counter argument to any given creationist argument. This is primarily due to the fact that creationist arguments are extremely unoriginal and repetitive (seriously, creationists have been hauling out the same arguments since before Darwin's time, regardless of the change in scientific thought or theory). So i'd say that Talk.Origins does a very good job of presenting both sides. It just happens that the creationist side is out-dated and unsupportable. But that's a matter of fact, not of inaccurate representation.

Also, we can't accurately ascertain whether the earth is the center of the universe or not. It's probably not, but the way space time expands gives no reference point for the point of origin. From any point in the universe, it looks like everything is expanding away from you.

But you are correct, the earth is indeed not flat. It's sort of a squashed sphere.