Google De-indexes Talk.Origins, Won't Say Why UPDATED 575
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.
Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
While, I have some sympathy for the guy, just because you think your an honest webmaster does not mean that Google should have to vet you and your content. They have a business to run too. At some point a webmaster has to put themselves in a position to recognize and address these sorts of problems BEFORE Google gets involved.
Re:Words are Meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)
Google censoring Usenet? Not! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Backups? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or even just MD5 sums of all their pages, once a day, with known updates marked as such.
There should be no reason anyone has to even contemplate manually digging through thousands of pages if they've prepared sufficiently beforehand.
Maybe they'll take some very simple & no-cost precautions now that they've been burned.
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. And you were wise to ask. What you're missing is that Google gave him no clue/hint/guide/comment/help on why he was delisted. Just tossed him off, left it to him to discover that this had happened in the first place, left it to him to figure out (guess) what the problem might be, and then only relisted him after they got around to it.
Like it or not, Google has essentially become a Public Utility. They also make great claims of their ethical behavior code. If a site is delisted, there's a reason. If there's a reason, then that reason can be shared with the contact e-mail address that's part of every domain name registration. To just pull the plug because you somehow -- maybe not even your fault -- ran afoul of a constantly changing set of rules is not aboveboard behavior for a $157B company.
That's what you're missing here.
You love to whine, don't you? (Score:4, Insightful)
"exposing creationist pseudoscience"...
Slashdot is so biased I don't know why I even bother anymore. Bashing Christians is so fashionable these days.
"Creationist" != "Christian", but don't let that stand in the way of your pretending to feel victimized.
Re:ahhh i love it (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like you blew the cover there, dude.
Whine, Whine, Whine (Score:5, Insightful)
In the webmaster's whining about Google, he complains about the request to be re-indexed containing:
*I believe this site has violated Googles quality guidelines in the past.
* This site no longer violates Googles quality guidelines.
He thinks these are "an admission of guilt", but they dont' say "I violated" they say "the site violated". So, if the site were hacked and did violate their indexing policy, fix it, say you've fixed it and move on. How many hits has he had over the years that came directly from Google? And did they come from Google due to all those people choosing Google to search for his site or it's topics? But now he whines about being delisted for the time it takes him to fix a site he should have kept unhacked in the first place.
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
People may be treating Google as a public utility, but Google (a private company) has absolutely no obligations to any website.
Ultimately, Google* has the right to change the rules when & if they please, in an arbitrary fashion, without consulting anyone.
*When I say "Google" I mean "the guys who own a majority stake in the company and cannot be overruled"
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is in an arms race with spammers and blackhat seo firms. How are they supposed to know whether someone is honest or just mining them for information for their scam?
Synopsis (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:3, Insightful)
Google has no such responsibilities just becuse of the way they're treated by users. (And even if you argue that they're a monopoly, they haven't been granted monopoly status by a government.)
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not for censoring any information, and I am not trying to defend google. But there may be one very good reason why this may be happenning this way.
Google is at war with search engine spammers. When google de-lists somebody for spamming their search engine, if they gave a specific reason why then all the spammers would do is tweak their spam farm and be up and running in a couple of hours.
If they told this guy what was wrong, they would have to spend a huge amount of time and resources telling why everyone is wrong, all the while helping out the spammers.
Google is a good search engine, but if you notice that if you go beyond a couple of pages out of search results, many times you will find nothing but useless "link farms." Unfortunately, spam is no longer limited to email inboxes anymore, it's everywhere.
Understandably confused that some is not all (Score:5, Insightful)
Bzzt. The website admin needs to locate one or more problems (== however many the cracker planted), and Google knows the exact location of at least one. "one or more" >= "at least one". If google tells people where their problems are, google will be playing whack a mole for eternity. There are contractors/services that should be able to help them/anyone, google is not one of them.
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:2, Insightful)
Can't you people see that you ought to get a clue as to what socialism is [geocities.com] before spouting crap like that?
Re:Words are Meaningless (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead he explodes with a "OMGosh, Google is dishonest, you guys won't communicate with us, why are you haters!" Well, okay, that's not a direct quote, but...
He has a legitimate axe to grind, he is just doing it in the wrong order. Get the site re-indexed FIRST, then start a debate about the methods used. Doing both at the same time colors the debate as a whine fest, which I am positive is not intended. (I read TOA all the time, good stuff in there)
probably just bad algorithms (Score:5, Insightful)
With the index sizes that are being collected by search engines these days (on the order of 10 billion entries), it's completely naive to think that some humans are sitting at a terminal choosing to delist websites for some policy reason or other. It's also completely naive to think that a human email monkey can do any sort of digging to find out the exact reason that Google's automated algorithm has censored this particular site.
Instead, Google's engineers have automated algorithms which do all the censorship, and the policy is just there as a thin cover for whatever the algorithm happens to be doing today. It's worse of course, because 1) algorithms change every few months and 2) there's simply no comprehensive way to test the quality of the implementation.
Anyone who's programmed a nontrivial algorithm knows that obscure edge cases are a bitch, and with 10 billion websites, any algorithm will have plenty of obscure edge cases which nobody has ever tested, nor ever will. The most likely explanation is that the website in TFA is a false positive of some subsystem, but fixing it will require changes to the algorithms, and Google don't want to risk that, would you? The problem will probably go away in a few months when the algorithms are scheduled to be updated.
Re:ahhh i love it (Score:5, Insightful)
ha ha ha ha. Yes, in ID the creator must only be someone eternally existing with the ability to manipulate all matter in the universe at will.
But diety [sic].... no!
In case you missed it, in ID it must be a deity, or else who created the creator? If life can not come from non-life, then there must be some eternally existing intelligence to kick things off (aka God). So either you don't understand the theory, or you are lying.
You have to love when a theory tries to sound more sane by saying "but... it could be space aliens too!"
Is there anything I'm missing there about ID?
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:3, Insightful)
With security mechanisms like that, it doesn't take much to get around them if the mechanism provides automated feedback.
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
It might be good, but my point is that Google doesn't have to... and maybe shouldn't.
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?
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.
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.
That may be more trouble than it is worth, compared to saying "not our problem, deal with it yourself."
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
Security through obscurity is no security at all. The spammers already know Google's weaknesses -- that's why there's so much spam everywhere.
Re:ahhh i love it (Score:2, Insightful)
So in other words, they're passively contributing to the collapse of western enlightenment. How ironic for a site dedicated to rooting out creationist pseudoscience.
In the new redacted words of Rousseau: "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall happily cave in if you threaten me with beheading."
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Ultimately, Google* has the right to change the rules when & if they please, in an arbitrary fashion, without consulting anyone.
Yes, but there is something called ethics. Google is held to a higher standard than the Ackbar and Jeff's Falafel and Oil Change Hut because of their unique position of being depended on by hunderds of millions of people the worldwide. Also, Google said they should be held to a higher standard with their "Don't be Evil" slogan.
Did Google act wrong in this case? No. But that doesn't mean that your larger point about corporations are beholden to no one is valid.
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:3, Insightful)
If the site was blacklisted because of spam links on a specific page, they can just say that. They don't need to list every single violation. Once the webmaster checks out that page, he can fix that and fairly easily search his whole site for similar problems. If you have a big site you have no idea what to look for or where to start otherwise. As it happens, the guy was reasonably lucky in that the links were on the home page...
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:2, Insightful)
This reeks of socialism. I felt the tone of the post tended more towards 'this sort of thing should be illegal.' Maybe it just meant 'we should dislike them greatly for this.' In that case, I still feel it was ignorance, because they have to protect the search rankings. I love them because they help me search, not because they help this guy keep his traffic flowing until he lets his forums get overrun with tainted data.
So you choose, socialist or ignorant. But you have to see how it seems socialist if he meant the former.
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:2, Insightful)
Google was completely in the right to de-list them.
Re:The problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:ahhh i love it (Score:3, Insightful)
I know this sounds logically weak (as do a lot of topics dealing with religion), but a long time ago it was a belief of science that the solar system was heliocentric and a belief of religion (at least the Catholic Church) that it was geocentric. Now we know it's heliocentric, and it's a concern of neither science nor religion. Similarly, if we can somehow know that there's a Creator, it's a matter of neither science or religion - religion will become knowing who the Creator is and how to worship him.
Re:Words are Meaningless (Score:3, Insightful)
He mentions that it's impossible to get any human response, phone or email. Unless you're buddies with Sergei, forget making personal appeals. Most big companies are like that, I once sent about 10 emails to Yahoo trying to work out a problem with my email account (which I pay then for, not a free account). I never got any response except links to irrelevant FAQ pages. Never one human being would give me their name to follow up.
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would a company want to be responsible for "your lost revenue" because you cannot administer a site to their terms of service guidlines? If the spider stops after finding the "first falt" and the dumbasses only fix the reported page, it could be a long time before they index the entire site to declare the problems with every page. I know a girl right now who does website design. She is being sued because she started building a ecommerce site and the customer decided he wanted it all done in flash. She told him she couldn't do it in flash because she didn't know how to tie her comerce programs into it. After insisting on it, she refunded his money and said be gone, he is now in litigation for lost revenue from a site that never existed. So i'm sure someoen would start with the "you didn't tell me about pages X-Y so you own me for down time".
This doesn't even begin to address the fact that google wouldn't have been able to tell them the site was hacked (which is ultimatly the case here). What kind of liability would they face if they said this page violates this agreement but fails to mention it was because of a cracker/hacker then the site gets defaced later or worse yet get it's credit card infor harvested? It just opens too many doors. If it doesn't agree with their terms then they delist it and the person ultimatly responcible for the site needs to find whats wrong with it in their own.
No Free Consulting (Score:4, Insightful)
Only friends and family get free computer help from me, but I'm rethinking that policy since I spent half a day cleaning the malware off my brother's computer during the last family holiday. He probably won't ask me to do it again, though. When he asked how his system got so infected, I answered (in front of the entire family), "You got infected from all those lesbian porn sites you've been visiting."
Re:ahhh i love it (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, we can predict and test for the differences between industrial and natural diamond. I'm sure we can do the same for at least some classes of artificially created/managed universes.. but there doesn't seem to be much of that in any of the ID "theory" I've seen. Almost as if those writing it have a different agenda, hm...
Re:ahhh i love it (Score:5, Insightful)
If you say that that's a metaphysical question that cannot be answered, why not just skip the whole designer/creator bit and say that you are not interested in physical modeling of the world. Invoking an extremely improbable super-being to explain the world is very unhelpful. That's what earlier civilizations did: thunder was Thor riding in his carriage in the sky etc
What the ID followers want is a return to that using the logic "I don't understand it so it must be God's work."
Ethics: The users are our customers (Score:5, Insightful)
If a site is designed ( or screwed up ) such that it shows as a result to a query when inappropriate, delivers spam, or ranks higher than the content would warrant, and Google still presents it as a search result, then Google has failed their customer.
Webmasters are not their customers, individuals who are searching are. Ethics says that you give your customers what you promised them. Ethics says you live up to what your stockholders expect by doing what you told them you do: Delivering search results that keep your customers coming back ( and serving them up ads each time ).
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanings are meaningless around here... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's funny how the Google apologists are always around on Slashdot to defend Google's (a private company) right to screw anyone, ...
It's also funny how the Google haters are also here to throw stones at every little perceived problem with how Google works. It's funny how they also seem to use Google a lot, despite of them. I wonder why that is. Could it be that Google does what they want it to do? And, is it Google's problem that so many sites have come to the conclusion that their very existence is tied to their Google page rank? If you do not like how Google works, don't use them, and use your site's robots.txt file to exclude them from indexing your site. The more people who use other search engines, the less "power" Google (or any other search engine) has over "the market".
In this particular case, Google gave the webmaster sufficient information to discover the problem. If it wasn't enough for "other honest webmasters", then they aren't particularly competent, in my opinion, which would tend to affect how I felt about their information being relevant, too. A lot of people spend a lot of effort trying to scam their way to the top of the page ranks. And it looks like Google is spending a lot of effort to keep the game "honest".
Google has no stake in my using their service, other than wanting to display advertising to me, just like a TV or radio station. Given that the website in question here is not a paid advertiser on Google, I don't see where they have a responsibility to do anything special for them. Their responsibility is to make money for their stockholders, the same as any other corporation. Their "niche" for doing this is to sell advertising that is displayed to people who willingly come to their site. Their way of making people come to their site willingly is to index pages in as "honest" a way as they can figure out to do. Refusing to index a particular site for dishonest links, whether intentional by the owner or not, makes them more desirable to most of their users.
And a few dozen people bitching about it in a front page story on Slashdot doesn't hurt, either.
Re: Some countries consider it hate speech. (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you call our attention to any creationist claims that have ever been made on talk.origins that didn't deserve to be dismissed out of hand?
> This blind faith in popular theories is not just restricted to theoretical physics but also appears in the biological sciences as well. Science is supposed to be a tool for discovery. It is not supposed to supply the meaning of life
Biology is no more concerned with the meaning of life than geology or meteorology is.
It's just that some peoples' world views are threatened by the facts that biology has uncovered.
> or delve into things which are best left to philosophers and theologians given our current state of technology.
I don't know of any question best left to philosophers and theologians. If it's not supported by evidence, it's just someone's opinion.
Welcome to the Real World (Score:4, Insightful)
Google has several billion pages in their index, and a significant portion of them are spam. Their business model relies on them having internal methods of dealing with web spam and it is not feasible or desirable for them to produce a list of violations to each and every person who runs afoul of their algorithms.
This is far from the most popular or important site this has happened to. Wordpress was delisted, as was BMW, Syndic8, and many others. This guy is using the controversial nature of his subject matter in an attempt to draw more attention. Get in line buddy, there is a long list of people whining all over the web about the same thing. Are you more important because the word Christianity is loosely affiliated with your site? Nope.
Do a little googling yourself and you can pretty easily figure out how to resolve the problem. It takes some time, and there are ways to accelerate the process. If you are that reliant on Google, it is time to start participating in some webmaster communities and figure out how to play ball with the Search Engines. Just like everybody else.
Re:The problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Synopsis (Score:1, Insightful)
You demonstrate an extremely common occurance of the fallacy of equivocation. Evolution is commonly defined as "a change in allele frequencies in a population over time." You are correct - that is observed, and is testable by repeatable experiments. It is a scientific fact upheld by numerous points of evidence.
However, creationists believe this too. Evolution and natural selection forms a central and key part of the creationist model of origins also. What is disputed is the absurd claim by Darwinists that all living things on earth today share a single common ancestor - a simple single celled organism from around 3 billion years ago.
Darwinism is filled with just-so stories about how a particular trait evolved. Darwinists cannot observe how a peacocks feathers evolved. They take guesses, and make stories about how it may have evolved, and how it may have given a selective advantage. Given the opposite trait, however, and Darwinism will again give a story to explain it. Darwinism contains many elements that are unobservable, untestable, and not possible to falsify. Darwinists are guilty of at least as much as they accuse Creationists.
Re:Synopsis (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:4, Insightful)
But if they tell the webmaster, who might be cheating, (remember, a lot of the exploits out there are actually used by the webmaster) where the problem is, then the cheating webmaster only has to get rid of one exploit and gains insight into the detection methods employed by Google. Then he can leave all the others in place. Wouldn't it be fair to say that the people doing evil is, well, the exploitive webmasters?
Don't hit reply yet...I know this guy was honest, but how in the hell could Google possibly tell who is legit and who is not? Google can't hope to be "fair," only just.
Re:Synopsis (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, the creator of life on Earth could be a space alien for all what I know, and I know ID as an idea includes this scenario as one possibility. However, the overwhelming majority of people advocating ID do so because they want to further their religious creationist cause. (And assuming an extraterrestrial creator only pushes the original problem of the birth of life further away.)
So, de jure ID does not assume a supernatural creator. De facto it does.
Re:Well I assume (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ahhh i love it (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not following your reasoning. Why do you believe that there being a Creator explains nothing? There being a creator changes many things about the way we live life - the value of other humans, the nature of morality, their being an objective and external purpose to life. Describing the Creator is certainly outside the purview of science, but it it not outside the ability of humans to describe at least partially by other means.
Besides, the question of who designed the designer is going to lead us nowhere. If we allow ourselves that question, then we will ask, "who designed the designer of the designer?" and so on. There are perfectly rational reasons for believing that the Creator is itself uncreated. All things that begin to exist have a cause. However, those things which did not begin to exist need no cause. The Creator, as many understand him, is a timeless entity and therefore uncreated. Since time does not exist outside the universe, and indeed began with the big bang, it is meaningless to ask what was "before" the big bang - and indeed to ask who created that which had no beginning. Some philosophers believe that, for example, numbers have a timeless existence. It is meaningless to ask when numbers began to exist.
Re:Synopsis (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the difference between science and fairy stories ( aka Christianity etc ), there is no need to make up stories to explain things for which we have no evidence to back up.
Re:ahhh i love it (Score:3, Insightful)
There just being a creator tells us nothing. It doesn't say if it is a Sumerian creator or Greek creator or alien creator and hence it tells us nothing about morality or the "purpose to life". If you want to claim that it is a specific designer, like say the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Christian God, then you have much more to prove than just that there is a designer. If you can prove that it is a specific creator with some known features then it might be more meaningful.
You are on the right track there, just take one step back and say that the question of who designed the world isn't going to lead as nowhere. If you are bent on not explaining anything then the more simple solution is to postulate that the universe has existed forever and is timeless. Why introduce the extra regress of a designer when it doesn't explain anything? And if you are hell-bent on having this meta-level why stop an obvious infinite regress at an arbitrary point? We can say as much about the hypothetical designer as we can about the hypothetical designer's hypothetical designer. So why just stop our questions at the level of the hypothetical designer?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Understandably confused that some is not all (Score:1, Insightful)
So if I want a page with malicious links to get indexed, I can put up a few hundred variations, and then take down all the ones that Google identifies, leaving the others to be indexed... There is a downside, and it's telling the malicious people exactly what they need to change in order to work around the automated process that's trying to stop them from getting their nasties indexed...
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be the same as Microsoft stopping an application from running under windows.
I disagree this is what's happened but that would be what's being implied by the ancestor posts.
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
Which would be an entirely appropriate response if said application was a virus.
Re:Ethics: The users are our customers (Score:2, Insightful)
Parent wrote:
Webmasters are not their customers, individuals who are searching are.
No more are the readers of the free papers customers of the free papers,
or the watchers of TV the broadcaster's customers.
These searchers', readers', watchers' eyeballs are the product delivered to the
customers.
Re:Ethics: The users are our customers (Score:1, Insightful)
Say the origins guy threw some spam links up, but did so secretly so google wouldn't notice. Google delisted him. Google then told them why he got delisted, and it found 8/10 spam links the origins guy threw up there. origins guy takes those 8 links down and leaves the 2 remaining up. Big problem.
Asymmetrical information, in this case, is required. Not because it is beneficial, but because symmetrical information can be exploited.
Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility (Score:2, Insightful)
"you can't carry that penknife on board"
(ditches penknife, tries again)
"you can't carry that belt-buckle-knife on board"
(ditches belt-buckle knife, tries again)...
Re:ahhh i love it (Score:3, Insightful)
The really nice thing about evolution is that unlike the designer hypothesis doesn't end with an infinite regress. The fundamental principle of natural selection is self-explanatory to such a degree that there is no room for a meta level. That organisms that are good at surviving are the ones that survive is really a principle difficult to dispute. And asking "Why do things that are good at surviving the ones that survive?" makes no sense. In essence the theory builds on such a simple axiom that it kills off the need for a meta level.
Physics isn't there yet - we don't have a solid scientific theory of the creation and development of the universe. Hopefully one day we'll have something as simple and elegant as Darwin's theory but right now we have a long way to go. Note however that just because we don't know how it works does not in any way support a supernatural explanation. Through a large part of the history of humanity we had no clue about how anything worked in the world. Now we know quite a bit more and not in one single instance has a supernatural explanation been the right one. So it would be silly to assume that the things we don't understand today will have a supernatural explanation.
Re:The problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Telling somebody that their position is wrong is not intolerance. And comparing reasonable discussion and argument to the holocaust is more than a bit silly.
Re:The problem (OT) (Score:2, Insightful)
I beg to differ. Political Correctness is a systematic Orwellian torturing of the language under the guise of civility, when it has nothing whatsoever to do with that. A label of "vertically challenged" is just so much meaningless noise if I continue to think less of you, and treat you worse, for being short.
Manners and civility are the grease that make the make the machinery of society go forth. PC puts the focus on word choice rather than intent, and is sand in the gears.
Re:The problem (Score:2, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with Christian beliefs or teachings. It has everything to do with the attempt to usurp science in an effort to replace it with these beliefs. If you care to notice, the classroom gives no traction to flat-earthers or stacks of turtles, either.
Believe what you want. Teach what you want in church. The last time I checked, though, my school does not have a steeple.