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.

huh?

What's this? [google.com]

Re:huh?

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. [talkorigins.org]

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:huh?

evolutionism, homosexualism - they're all new, and evil ! Better stick to the good old isms such as religionism, wifebeatism and alcoholism.

Hmm

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.

Google censoring Usenet? Not!

The writeup sucks. It implies that Google is censoring Usenet.

Backups?

You'd think they'd keep regular "Last Known Good" backups and just be able to do a simple diff between the current page & their backup.

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:Backups?

That presupposes the site was intelligently designed. Starting with that kind of assumptions is completely unscientific.

Whine, Whine, Whine

So many people refer to Google as if it were a human looking at web sites and giving it the big thumbs up or down. As part of the indexing if the spider finds "violations" such as presenting a different page to spiders than to humans, it risks being dropped from the index. To expect a human response to why each site triggered the de-indexing is not reasonable.

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:Whine, Whine, Whine

Heresy! Google sees all, Google knows all! Google is a man, a spider, and the holy page in one!

Brin 3:14 "And Google so loved the internet, that he sent his only-born son Larry Page to it so that any who believe in him shall not perish but have ever-lasting life in the Googleplex."

So you see, there *is* a person, Larry Page, who is also the spider that indexes everything and is also the page that serves up results. Only through this holy trinity could results as good as Google's result, thus proving Google's divinity. If the almighty Google has delisted this sinner's page, then we should not be looking at it in the first place, yes? To go against the wishes of Google brings hellfire!

Same thing happened to the first wiki

The first wiki, c2.com, also has a similar problem. Google stopped indexing it (or at least listing it), and nobody is sure why. It may be a side-effect of anti-spam features that c2 added, but this is just speculation. Site custodians debated removing the anti-spam features because of this, but it has yet to be settled.

Synopsis

"Talk.Origins is an archive with thousands of pages exposing creationist pseudoscience"

This article is a submission containing a biased summary which has little to do with the actual topic, which is the enigmatic status of Google's search algorithms.

Re:Synopsis

I think that the person you are replying to is referring to the big bang. If you look far back enough into the history of the universe, you get to a point where everything began to exist. At the singularity of the big bang, we find that both time and space began. There is no "before" the big bang, as time did not exist. This is a central part of the cosmological argument for God's existence:
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause
What came before the big bang? That question is meaningless, as time did not exist. So you have a few options, only one of them feasible. The first is that the universe is infinitely old and had no beginning. Once a view of atheists, this is no longer scientifically plausible. The second answer is that the universe came into existence from nothing - absolutely nothing. The third, and most reasonable, is that something else caused the universe to be created. This cause must itself be timeless, and spaceless, as time and space began to exist with the big bang.

So the atheist must either claim the absurdity that the universe came from nothing, or he(/she) must acknowledge that there was something that created it. And that *something* is inaccessible from scientific analysis. It is not, however, too far from the reach of philosophy and logic. We can draw reasonable conclusions about this entity.

Re:Synopsis

What came before the big bang? That question is meaningless, as time did not exist. So you have a few options, only one of them feasible. The first is that the universe is infinitely old and had no beginning. Once a view of atheists, this is no longer scientifically plausible.

Sorry, you are incorrect. There wasn't any time before the big bang, thus nothing could have come before it as you yourself stated. Not even time, as the big bang was the beginning of time. However one alternative view is that the universe oscillates between a big bang and a big crunch, thus from a timeless point-of-view the universe would be infinite.

What I really find worrying (hello, 1500's are calling) is the method of reasoning by creationists, like yourself.
A: There was a big bang.
B: We currently don't know what was the cause of this.
C: There must be 'some higher being' that created the universe.

Now A and B do not lead to C, no matter how you reason. If you want to have a drop of credibility, you'll have to support your claims. However, you can not, thus your logic is flawed. What created the 'entity' you speak of? What came before it? Why did it create the universe? If you want to play the science game, you should be answering those questions. Science allows questions to be left open, but tries to answer as many as possible by using facts. Creationism is not, and is unlikely to ever be, scientific or logical. You are allowed to believe in the toothfairy for all I care, but unless you have evidence that a mystical entity is willing to pay for your teeth: keep your belief to yourself.

Re:Synopsis

To paraphrase your post: "science is a religion". I disagree, please correct me if I misunderstood.

Science is based on a single "article of faith", ie: I belive the real world exists as I and others who inhabit said "real world" collectively percieve it. I can only prove with certainty that I exist and furthermore can only prove it to myself. If I do not have faith in the real world then "others" must be a figment of my imagination, a troublesome state of affairs since the imaginary/real others will declare me a psychopath [google.com] and lock me up in a real/imaginary padded room.

Since I and "others" can observe and agree on things in and about the real world we can create testable theories that can be refined to better fit our observations and accurately predict outcomes. ie: We can practice the scientific method and refine our theories until we reach a (possibly non-existant) point where the only "assumption" is that the real world exists, or as I like to put it the Universe "just is".

So regarding a belief in evolution - The only faith required is the faith that the real world exists.

As for religion, it is based on blind faith, blind since I and "others" cannot percieve the same observations, these observations and associated theories fail the "real world" test because they cannot be demonstrated to "others" using their own perceptions. This does not mean religion is pointless or even psuedoscience, it simply means religion is not comprable to science (apples vs oranges). In my mind making such comparisons entirely misses the point of both endevours.

Psuedoscience, litteraly "fake science" is blind faith dressed in a lab coat. Sure creationism is a theory but it's NOT a scientific one, claiming otherwise is by definition, psudoscience.

Finally the lack of a strong scientific theory for the origin of life does not validate creationisim, nor does it invalidate the theory of evolution.

Bias: I suppose you could argue on some deep philosophical level that faith in the "real world" makes me biased toward...um...the real world, I can only wonder if that automatically means psychopath are unbiased? What does "science is a religion" prove? - I'm biased because science has a demonstratably superior track record of explaining and predicting the real world's behaviour whereas blind faith performs no better than random chance. Is that the kind of "bias" we are talking about here? - Because if it is, I am wondering how a non-phycopath can go to bed confident they will awake on the same planet the next morning?

Short cut to scientific enlightenment: Carl Sagan's book "A demon haunted world". It's also serves as an outstanding example of what a skeptic should be.

Understandably confused that some is not all

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.

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.

Caped Hacker

This was quite obviously the work of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

probably just bad algorithms

While it's natural to sympathise with the victimized website, it doesn't follow that Google is doing something Evil(TM) in this instance, rather it's most likely that their current algorithms are badly tuned.

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:probably just bad algorithms

While it's natural to sympathise with the victimized website, it doesn't follow that Google is doing something Evil(TM) in this instance

They really trademarked that? Shit, they don't really leave people much choice than being good these days.

Tell whom precisely?

Look for the webmaster's email address on the pages, assume it's [e-mail] or try [e-mail]? All these could bounce or simply disappear. Should Google put the effort into finding out who the webmaster really is?

The Truth

Let's face it. It's all a vast right wing conspiracy by fundamentalist Christians to remove any website that counters their beliefs... either that or it's simple Google policy and posting this story was a waste of everyone's time and only served to try and stir up debate.

Why should google have to tell him anything?

It's not like google is running his board or that he is paying google to debug his site.

I felt like making some silly comment about how lost the site is with out creationism and science.
Without either the site couldn't exist, or at least there would be nothing to "talk" about.

Some paradoxs:

We have science and use it to do things, to create things. Someday we may have the know how to create a galaxy and care for it lie a farmer does his crop. To inject life and help mold it to a conscious life from. But what would hat life form believe? Creationism, that they can never be such creator we have become? Maybe they would rather develope science and learn how to.

One cannot exist without the other.

Right to life vs. freedome of choice is another paradox exposed by a starving child who doesn't seem to have the freedome of choice to eat some food and there for will lose his right to life. Imagin all teh children that could have been feed, clothed, taught, given shelter and medicine with all the resources that have been wasted in the arguement....

People who something for themselves can sometime take advantage of something symbotic by falsely splitting it to create a public arguement that sells their book or presence, wins them an election, etc..
.

 

Google is acting like a woman

Or at least like a particular ex of mine... (I know -- I shouldn't generalize)

"If you don't know what you did wrong, I'm not going to tell you!"

cue jokes about /.ers and girlfriends...

Google Webmaster Tools

Google have a set of http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ [google.com] 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:Google Webmaster Tools

Google certainly has some useful tools, but when they don't work you are screwed. I have a site which I won't name which is not indexed by google and I have absolutely no idea why. I've submitted the url, built a sitemap using their own tools, validated it and even submitted the site for relisting. It still isn't there. What have I done wrong? The tools say everything is fine except it isn't. I could go to the web forum but other postings suggest the employees will likely just tell me wait for indexing. Except its not indexing me.

The sick thing is that I have Google Adwords on that site so each day that Google don't list me, THEY are losing money. I estimate I get 10x the click through business from MSN search than I do from Google. I'd probably make 3x the profit (as would Google) if they'd index.

Easy to check.

I recently had several sites that I host find their way into Google hell. I wrote a small 15 line Perl script (using File::Find) to hunt thru thousands of pages and return all url patterns.

Filtered out local domains and found easily found the problem with a run away forum that spammer zeroed in. Looks like they were also using a Perl script :{

They had uploaded over 3000 links - the bastards.

Ironical

A site gets delisted by google.
Then scores a slashdot homepage link.

People complain about this?

Really. Google has no obligation to anyone but its shareholders. You can start calling google evil when it pulls a microsoft and says "Redhat, install us as your default search engine and delete yahoo from your computers or we'll de-list your site".

Where to start looking

with no guidance as to what the problem was and nothing at all about where to start looking...
So you're a web master and you don't know how to check if the content you're mastering is OK. We clearly have to redefine the word master .

Talkorigins hacked by porn spammers

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 [72.14.203.104] showing the porn spam links.

However, I checked on deepx.com [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 [theoi.com] and it is *not* a porn site, either:

Here's how THEOI used to look via the Wayback machine. [archive.org]

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.

No Free Consulting

Basically, this "so called" webmaster wanted free consulting from Google. I don't think so. My personal response would have been, "I'll be happy to supply you with the information you request. It will, however, cost you my standard consulting rate of $xx/hour, two hour minimum."

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."

happens all the time

This is how google does business

I used to work on a site that had this happen. It ends up that past practices from the company led to the penalty and delisting. Unfortunately, google will not tell you exactly what you are doing wrong.

It pretty much led to the demise of the company. Sales plummeted so far that the investor pulled the plug. We did actually end up fixing the issue and relisted but the damage was done. (amongst other problems the company had...wasn't only google that did them in)

There really should be a tool provided by google that tests your site and tells you if and what it finds wrong. You would think this would be easy considering the code already exists.

Perhaps it could even just be a tool provided only to advertisers.

Welcome to the Real World

Have a peek over at the forums at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint, SearchEngineWatch, or any number of other webmaster related sites. This happens all the time. It is an issue that webmasters have had to deal with for some time now. Google at least provides some input for you if you can be bothered to register a sitemap with them.

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.

Google emailed this site

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 [mattcutts.com].

The only reason

The only reason this article appeared on the /. is because crusaders against creationism (rightfully) suffered (for the reasons unrelated to the content), and the viciously atheistic vigilante crowd of alarmists started to moan and moarn. The /. editors smelled the opportunity to add some hits (why? /. is very popular without this sensationalism).

evolution

So, if evolutionary theory is correct, it seems to have favoured a line of cry babies. There's evidence against, if ever there was any.

I suppose he could be a mutant....and his predecessors are all non-cry babies.

They Saw Some Spotted Somes Signs of Design...

in their website. But if you wait a million years, Google's algorithm could randomly change.

Insert creepy music here.

After seeing the headlines, I popped "talk.origins" into my Google search bar and got "trueorigin.org." Which claims to "Expose the myth of Evolution."

WHAT THE FUCK.

Who are Google's customers?

This whole article assumes that Google exists for the convenience of websites -- it doesn't. Google exists for the convenience of USERS who, as a group, view advertisers' paid links. As a user, I don't give a shit if Google notifies website owners about their reasons for delisting.

It isn't googles fault, false assumptions

The assumption that google "knows" where the problems are is based on a probably false assumption. Many times these algorithms use merely ranking and automated inspection.

Google has billions of pages indexed, there isn't enough time or manpower to have humans inspect pages. Even if they could elevate to a human, google could not possibly inspect for every domain.

The truth is that the webmaster let his site get hacked, Google delisted the site to protect the integrity of its product. It is the responsibility of the WEBMASTER to protect the integrity of their site. He may complain that he has to assume "guilt" (He doen't really, he merely has to affirm he has corrected the problems and believes that there are no more.) The problem is he IS guilty of being a bad admin that allowed someone to hack his site, and he wants to blaim google and not himself.

Is this suprising? News?

If Google revealed the core techniques used by its index to filter out hacked pages, then it would be effectively making those techniques useless. Its the same reason Microsoft and Firefox have not told the world how its anti-phishing features work, even if you have a domain that appears erroneously as phished. Its also the same reason that only dozens Google employees REALLY know how AdSense works. We know it depends on the context of the page, but clearly there is more to it (this confirmed by an Google employee friend of mine who is under NDA; could noy say more).

Its security through obscurity, sure... A valid form of security when the goal is to prolong discovery of methods until new ones are in place.

Google Secretly Creationist?

I hope this gets fixed soon. Because now when you search for talk.origins the first thing that pops up is true.origins. www.trueorigin.com which I won't link to. They are a bunch of willfully ignorant creationists. Sorry that was redundant.

Anyway, here's the proper link http://www.talkorigins.org/ [talkorigins.org] if you can't find it with google. I occassionally use other search engines like AllTheWeb [alltheweb.com] if I can't find what I'm looking for with google.

And there's nothing on the Talk.origins news page [talkorigins.org] about the delisting.

Nazis on Usenet

Has anyone called anyone a nazi yet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law [wikipedia.org]

Re:Words are Meaningless

Nobody was evil here. The guy's site got hacked and spam links added, Google rightfully de-listed him, and then the webmaster found the problem, fixed it, and asked Google to re-list. Am I missing something?

The problem

was that he had no idea why he was delisted so he could fix the problem.

Re:The problem

And with good reason I'd say. If I add a couple of ways to "fool" a search engine to my web pages, I can't seriously expect that same search engine to tell me which of the tricks they discovered?

Well I assume

the revenue brought into google by having his site indexed, was considerably lower than the cost of having a google employee investigating his problem and givin him a site-audit.
Weird, eh?

Re:The problem

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.

Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility

Like it or not, Google has essentially become a Public Utility.

I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on that.

People may be treating Google as a public utility, but Google (a private company) has absolutely no obligations to any website.

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.

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

Google is a Public company, not a private company.

Google is publicly traded, but for all intents and purposes, privately owned by 3 people (who control 66% of the shareholder votes).

So if they know where the problem is, it would be *good* for them to help out and point the site admin at the problem area. Right?

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

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.

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:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility

People may be treating Google as a public utility, but Google (a private company) has absolutely no obligations to any website.

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.

Ethics: The users are our customers

Google has been up front with where their loyalties lie in the search engine business: With the user. They got big and continue to be big because the give results that the search users are looking for. In general, this means the links they present are on the topic queried for and on the basis of links from other sites the content has been "rated" useful.

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

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.

Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility

It would be the same as Microsoft stopping an application from running under windows.

Which would be an entirely appropriate response if said application was a virus.

Meanings are meaningless around here...

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:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility

Going on the market puts some control of the company into the hands of shareholders, not the general public. Become a shareholder, then you can have a say and ask for a nice, friendly email.

Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility

I was under the impression that they told the webmaster the reason they were delisted, they just didn't tell the webmaster the specific pages that the reason pertained to. Like "Your site has been delisted for hidden links to non-topical sites" instead of "Your site has been delisted for hidden links to non-topical sites on pages index.html, intro.html." etc. To me, that's a webmaster job. Google did their job on their end. What if the site had hundreds of pages of non-topical links? What if Google spiders just stopped at the first one they indexed (as they should). Should google be in charge of going through this guy's site and telling him exactly where the problems are? They are a search engine, not a website security firm. People are getting lazier everyday and everyone expects someone else to do their dirty work for them. People need to take some responsibility and stop whining.

Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility

What if you went through airport security and instead of saying "you can't carry that penknife on board" they just said "you have something forbidden"? When I code an error message into a piece of software I don't just say "You did something wrong" I know what the cause of the error is so I tell them.

Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility

Unfortunately you're missing something too.

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?

Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility

What you're missing is that Google gave him no clue/hint/guide/comment/help on why he was delisted.

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.

Re:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility

> 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.

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:Words are Meaningless - Public Utility

What you're missing is that Google gave him no clue/hint/guide/comment/help on why he was delisted.

login: root
password: ******

Incorrect login for user "root". You got the first and fourth characters correct, and one other character was correct but in the wrong place. Please try again and/or make use of one of the following clues/hints.

You can also try one of the following non-root accounts:
1. admin (8 character password)
2. backup (6 character password, all lowercase letters)
3. johndoe (5 character password)
4. maryjane (7 character password)

Failing that, if you can't remember any passwords this server is located at 1234 Main Street, Anywhere, USA. The server rack key is located in the desk drawer on the second floor in the manager's office. You can boot with a Knoppix CD (inside the rack) and reset the password after mounting the hard drive.

Often, helpfulness is at odds with security.
 

Re:Words are Meaningless

and saying you're not evil doesn't mean that you should donate your time to every webmaster in the world either.

Re:ahhh i love it

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

Re:ahhh i love it

Biased? Show me some creationist science please. It's not biased if it's the truth.

Hence, we must oppose monopoly.

In order for the free market to function properly, we must have competition. As Google grows its marketshare beyond 75%, I hope that the remaining search-engine companies merge into a competitor against Google. The competitor will address any market need that Google (like in this case) deliberately ignores.

Similarly, AMD, though it is much smaller than Intel, provided the necessary competition in the x86 market. When Intel ignored the market need for a 64-bit version of the x86, AMD quickly met that need. AMD's actions vastly enriched the market. Look at the 64-bit x86 servers that are proliferating in the market.

You love to whine, don't you?

"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:You love to whine, don't you?

Is that what the Bible says? No, it isn't. The Bible says Jesus created a perfect, sinless world. Man sinned, and brought the curse of sin and death on mankind -- man's choice, man's free-will.

This seems contradictory to me. Man is part of the world. How does your definition of perfect and sinless make any sense, if man (as part of the world) is able to introduce sin? That's like saying Windows '95 is stable just because it hasn't crashed yet, even though it could if you run an ill-behaved program. Or a Unix machine that's on the internet with remote logins available for root, with no root password is secure, just because no one's logged in and done anything malicious yet.

But enter what Jesus did, its anything but. Its grace, compassion, and mercy beyond anything ever known.

So he made the world, thought it was secure, then man hacked in, jesus realized he fucked it up the first time, so he released a fix? And you worship this dude as being the best? Oh, plus then there's all those little undocumented patches that the church slipstreamed in over the years. Sounds like the christian influence is what ruined the software industry!

Re:ahhh i love it

"exposing creationist pseudoscience"... Slashdot is so biased I don't know why I even bother anymore. Bashing Christians is so fashionable these days.

Wait a second - I thought that creationism was a "valid alternative scientific explanation for the origin of the species", and not religion. Are you saying that it's really religion, specifically Christianity , wrapped in deceptive packaging?

Sounds like you blew the cover there, dude.

Re:ahhh i love it

ID does not propose that the creator must be a diety

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:ahhh i love it

Why should it be the responsibility of ID to explain who created the creator?

Because it otherwise fails to explain anything. If irreducibly complex things require a designer then the designer who designed them will be even more complex. Since the designer theory can't tell us, well, anything, the only way to investigate is to go up the ladder: who designed the designer?

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."

Re:ahhh i love it

Somebody call the waaaaaah-mbulance.

Re:ahhh i love it

bashing creationist pseudoscience is going to be fashionable on any science site
AFAIK all Christians don't buy the pseudoscience but I believe in Newton so I'll stay out of that
however I do think we should change Dec 25 to 'blaim America first' day

oh nevermind, my bad

I saw User-Agent: * and my knee jerk reaction was that it meant all robot agents were disallowed... nevermind.

Re:ahhh i love it

Why do you equate creationism with Chritianity; Christianity is all about Jesus; there's no "gospel" of Adam and Eve.

Re:Some countries consider it hate speech.

In some countries a woman is stoned for not wearing a tent. Welcome to America.

> String theory is an attempt to unify various theories under one umbrella but it unfortunately is not testable and hinges of the existence of dark matter and dark energy.

String theory is not testable so far and certainly disprovable. As it is disprovable, it is a valid scientific theory. If you read /. you know how this argument applies to ID. Where the problem arises is trying to dress up 'faith' as 'science', as if science could threaten faith, and constantly moving the goal posts when the arguments crumble. I think people are justifiably wary when faith moves into the secular realm. One man's heresy is another man's pop song.

> Too much of the so-called "science" we see today is nothing more than new age philosophy combined with pseudo-science.

If you include string theory in the above statement you don't do mathematics. Wrong, possibly, new age philosophy, no (.. well, maybe, whatever floats your boat).

>science was merely a study of how things work, not why we are here or whether there is a good.

I'd take issue with the 'merely' but other than that what's your point? Does string theory address why we are here? (it may try to redefine 'here' but that's a different issue)

> I am a theist who views the science of today with a sceptical eye and only trusts theories which have observable proofs that do no depend upon other assumptions.

Good luck with that. See: Godel. Also, as a 'theist', are you differentiating between 'new age philosophy' and 'old age philosophy'? Curious where that goes.

Re:Some countries consider it hate speech.

You wrote:

>I cannot fathom why scientific community did not go back to the drawing board to create
>a model that fit the known universe rather than inventing fanciful things such as dark
>matter and dark energy.

>Too much of the so-called "science" we see today is nothing more than new age
>philosophy combined with pseudo-science.

>....trusts theories which have observable proofs that do no depend upon other assumptions.

Now the rebuttal:

I shall start at the bottom, as this is where you are going wrong. Most important i feel is the term "observable proof". What is an "observable proof"? Does this mean you only trust things you can see? If so, simple concepts such as soap and disinfectant are beyond the science you wish to grasp. All modern medicine depends on things you can't see. The computer with which you wrote this opinion depends on utilises many phenomena you can't see, most imortantly electricity, semi-conduction and magnetism. These also require some of your "assumptions" in their explanation.

So what does "observable proof" mean? I hope it doesn't mean "something which can be explained to ME in a way that I understand".

Modern science is not "new age philosophy combined with pseudo-science". This is simply plain wrong. Modern science builds on the work that has gone before, and modern scientists go to great lengths to ensure that the work they do extends this (this can include the evolution/rejection of previous theories as well as the development of new ones). And this means being aware of, and understanding, the work which has gone before and the concepts on which it is based. You don't learn this by magic - it's damn hard work. Throwing out a previous theory and starting again is unimaginably difficult, which is why it is rarely done (as it may take a lifetime) and is generally achieved by those we term "genius".

The confusion you have on this point can probably be placed (at least in part) on the desire for science to be more accessible to the general public. We are increasingly surrounded by a lot of stuff we don't understand, and we want to know more about it. The problem is, by the time the scientists have come up with an approximate explanation that YOU can understand, and then the media has turned it into a 30 second piece that the blonde reporter can understand, it starts to look a bit shabby. But believe me, if the real science was anything like the stuff you see in the media, you'll be lucky if the sun comes up tomorrow.

And on to the final (or first, by your order) point. "I cannot fathom why scientific community....". I think the first three words of this explain the problem. There is no shame in not understanding something, but you should be careful in the dissemination of your ignorance - you would not want your work criticised by someone who knows nothing about it, and nor do the scientists that you are accusing of charlatanism.

Re:And about these upset with de-indexing...

I wonder how many people agitated over the de-indexing of Talk.Origins would be very happy that Creation as an alternate theory of origins be barred from being taught along-side the theory of evolution in public schools.

If you are going to call Creation a theory, you presumably have some testable evidence for that.

Re: exposing creationist pseudoscience

> I enjoy slashdot, usually, but the rabid religion-hating mobs that pool their ignorance really ruin it at time imo.

Sounds like you're confusing "creationist pseudoscience" with "religion".

Re: Some countries consider it hate speech.

> There are a lot of hypocrites on that site. They claim that religious people are closed minded while completely ignoring anything the other side presents out of hand.

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.

Re:Some countries consider it hate speech.

Science is supposed to be a tool for discovery. It is not supposed to supply the meaning of life or delve into things which are best left to philosophers and theologians given our current state of technology.

"What's the problem?" said Lunkwill.

"I'll tell you what the problem is mate," said Majikthise, "demarcation, that's the problem!"

"We demand," yelled Vroomfondel, "that demarcation may or may not be the problem!"

"You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"

"That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

Re:Regardless of what you believe...

While I agree that the write-up's use of "pseudoscience" was meant to be flamebait, pseudoscience most certainly has an objective definition, and it doesn't involve the assumption that science is whatever the majority says. Science by definition is a set of theories built up inductively from empirical evidence based on the scientific method, which states that any new model must be falsifiable and better represent available data than the old model does, with a general preference for simplicity and logic.

Pseudoscience is anything masquerading as science which does not fit this definition. "Pseudo" comes from Greek and means fake or false. It's really fairly logical.

Religion is not pseudoscience by definition, because most religious people know full well that religion and science are not the same thing and in fact attempt to explain fundamentally different concepts. This is why, for example, many of the world's greatest scientific minds have been devoutly religious and have seen no contradiction in this. However, when one attempts to equate science and religion, or advance religious explanations as competing scientific theories, the use of the word pseudoscience becomes appropriate.

In the case of "creationist science" (their term, not mine) you have an explanation that fails to qualify as science on many different levels. This does not mean you shouldn't believe in it, but it's important to recognise that you are accepting it as an article of faith -- faith being the definining center of most religion. When you attempt to make creationism into science by suggesting it as a competing theory for (in this case) the origin of man and animals, you are, as per the scientific method, suggesting that it is a better theory than evolution for the data we have, and that it is falsifiable. It is not falsifiable, evidently. The religious man sees Genesis as canon, and does not question its veracity -- but questioning the veracity of anything, including evolution, is at the heart of science. Ultimately, science cannot address the existence or non-existence of God, because there is no evidence either way. In fact, taking the leap of faith, accepting Jesus as your Lord and Saviour, well, these things are sort of central to the Christian experience. In my mind -- and I am admittedly not a fundamentalist -- if God's existance were scientifically verifiable, no reversal of the original sin would truly be possible. But that's theology, not science.

Remember too, and this is important, the questions that science and religion aim to address. They are not the same, and it is wise not to conflate them. Science addresses the how, and never the why -- by science's very nature, asking why will always lead to an infinite regression, and so scientists avoid asking why, and limit themselves instead to how. Science is misrepresented to the layman by the media in this respect, which is why I think there is often so much conflict between spirituality and science. For example, when Newton developed his theory of gravitation, and when Einstein later refined it, these men (religious, both of them) were not asking "why" does the apple fall or the earth rotate the sun, but rather they were explaining "how", quantitatively, such a thing occured, and how one could go about predicting it. The why, well, that's a much more difficult question. If you think on this a moment, you'll realise that saying "Two objects are attracted to each other by a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them" does not in anyway explain "why" this effect exists. Indeed, science cannot explain why gravity exists, or why we exist, or what our role is, or how we fit into the greater cosmic plan, or if there is such a plan.

Taking evolution, the person who answers "Why are we here" with "Because we evolved from apes" has misunderstood the question. His answer, at best, explains how the human species came to be, but even then, it explains only the last ste

Re:ahhh i love it

Don't see anything about Christianity in the article, although there's a fairly accurate dig at creationism.

Re:ahhh i love it

"exposing creationist pseudoscience"
Slashdot is so biased I don't know why I even bother anymore. Bashing Christians is so fashionable these days.

You're a moron.

I don't just say that insult you, but to make an imporant point. Did I just bash Christians? No I didn't, I BASHED YOU. Just because you are a moron-who-happens-to-be-Christian does not give you any right to hide behind the majority of good intelligent Christians, it gives you no right claim I am attacking *them*.

There are SOME Christians who happen to be Creationists who DO spout pseudo-science baloney, and they do deserve to be rightly bashed for that bad behavior.

Fortunately they are a MINORITY.

the Vatican Observatory in conjunction with the Berkeley-based Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences held a conference on the issue of evolution to which they invited theologians, philosophers, and scientists from around the world. Here, Christian participants overwhelming agreed that evolution was not in conflict with Christian faith, and that on the contrary it could be seen as the way in which God goes about being creative within the world. Link. [pbs.org]

The MAJORITY of Christistians accept evolution. The MAJORITY of people who accept evolution are Christians (at least in the western world).

Newsweek magazine:

there are some 700 scientists with respectable academic credentials (out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life scientists) who give credence to creation-science

There just is no credible "creation science" against evolution, as judged by the actual professional experts in the field. Even if we toss out half of that 480,000 scientists as being "evil biased lying atheists", you STILL have somewhere around 240,000 Christian earth and life scientists saying that the anti-evolution arguments are non-credible.... that it is all "pseudoscience". About 99.7% of Christian earth and life scientists saying that the anti-evolution arguments are non-credible.... that it is all "pseudoscience".

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