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Google Crawls The Deep Web
mikkl666 writes "In their official blog, Google announces that they are experimenting with technologies to index the Deep Web, i.e. the sites hidden behind forms, in order to be 'the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines'. For that purpose, the engine tries to automatically get past the forms: 'For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML'. Nevertheless, directions like 'nofollow' and 'noindex' are still respected, so sites can still be excluded from this type of search.'"
Soon, they'll start injecting SQL too to help map databases! Google is so useful indeed! :)
They just bought everything on Amazon.
On the plus side, this should enable Google to get by the "Must be 18 to view" buttons
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I am just submitting this form to see what's behind it. PLEASE IGNORE ME.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
If you haven't already noticed, AdSense has features now to tell Google how to log into your website so it can catalog your user-only pages. You know what that means. Porn sites are going to start using this so that Googlebot can confirm that it's age is over 18. We'll be showered with a gigantic wave of pornographic information. We will soon have to press juvenile charges against a corporate entity because it lied about its age on web forms to gain access to pornography and forum discussions.
When I interned at Google, someone told me a funny anecdote about a guy who emailed their tech support insisting that the Google crawler had deleted his web site. At first, I think he was told that "Just because we download a copy of your site, doesn't mean your local copy is gone." (a'la obligatory bash.) But, the guy insisted, and finally they double checked and his site was in fact gone. Turns out that it was a home-brewed wiki-style site, and each page had a "delete" button. The only problem was, the "delete" button sent its query via GET, not POST, and so the Google spider happily followed those links one-by-one and deleted the poor guy's entire site. The Google guys were feeling charitable and so they sent him a backup of his site, but told him he wouldn't be so lucky the next time, and he should change any forms that make changes to POSTs -- GETs are only for queries.
So, long story short, I wonder how Google will avoid more of this kind of problem if they're really going off the deep end and submitting random data on random forms on the web. Like the above guy, people may not design their site with such a spider in mind, and despite their lack of foresight this could kill a lot of goodwill if done improperly.