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:You love to whine, don't you?

[notwrong]

Nothing in the bible condones the crusades, nor any other of the violations against the Laws of Humanity/Nature(tm) that are on these lists.

The difficulty I see is that things that you are attempting to distance yourself from, such as the crusades (and there are many more examples), were once accepted by the vast majority of Christians as being in accordance with, or even required by, the biblical scholarship of the time.

If you can say "oh, those Christians in ages past were all just misguided, we've got the right idea now", how can you be sure the same won't be said of modern Christians' viewpoints in another few centuries?