Google De-indexes Talk.Origins, Won't Say Why UPDATED
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Dec 03, 2006 11:21 PM
from the honest-webmasters-go-fish dept.
from the honest-webmasters-go-fish dept.
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.
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Google De-indexes Talk.Origins, Won't Say Why UPDATED
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huh? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:huh? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.sff.net/people/Daniel.Dvorkin | Last Journal: Friday October 12, @01:42PM)
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? (Score:4, Funny)
(http://ufy.sourceforge.net/)
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.
Google censoring Usenet? Not! (Score:5, Insightful)
Backups? (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Saturday February 25 2006, @11:02PM)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
Whine, Whine, Whine (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.KateTheDog.com)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday March 31 2003, @01:23AM)
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 (Score:1, Interesting)
(http://www.geocities.com/tablizer | Last Journal: Saturday March 15 2003, @01:22PM)
Synopsis (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://operagost.com/ | Last Journal: Monday May 01 2006, @12:08PM)
Re:Synopsis (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.aperte.nl/ | Last Journal: Monday July 07 2003, @05:11AM)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Tuesday February 13 2007, @05:31PM)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.and.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday December 07 2006, @05:00PM)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
(http://slashdotislame.org/ | Last Journal: Monday March 17 2003, @08:15PM)
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:probably just bad algorithms (Score:4, Funny)
They really trademarked that? Shit, they don't really leave people much choice than being good these days.
Tell whom precisely? (Score:1)
(http://www.users.on.net/~medge)
The Truth (Score:2, Funny)
Why should google have to tell him anything? (Score:2)
(http://threeseas.net/ | Last Journal: Friday January 18 2002, @01:44PM)
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 (Score:2)
(http://www.aliassketchbookpro.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday September 04 2005, @10:37AM)
"If you don't know what you did wrong, I'm not going to tell you!"
cue jokes about
Google Webmaster Tools (Score:5, Informative)
(http://steve.blogdns.org/)
Re:Google Webmaster Tools (Score:4, Interesting)
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. (Score:2)
(http://perlworks.com/)
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 (Score:2)
(http://www.businessphonesdirect.com/)
Then scores a slashdot homepage link.
People complain about this? (Score:1)
Where to start looking (Score:2)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://geekbiker.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 01 2004, @05:57PM)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.stevekallestad.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 31, @03:02AM)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.google.com/webmasters/)
The only reason (Score:2)
(http://en.wikipedia....vated_protein_kinase | Last Journal: Monday April 30 2007, @06:22AM)
evolution (Score:3, Funny)
I suppose he could be a mutant....and his predecessors are all non-cry babies.
They Saw Some Spotted Somes Signs of Design... (Score:2, Funny)
(http://www.geoffrobinson.net/)
Insert creepy music here. (Score:2)
WHAT THE FUCK.
Who are Google's customers? (Score:2)
It isn't googles fault, false assumptions (Score:2)
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? (Score:2)
(http://www.adkap.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday August 10 2006, @04:10PM)
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? (Score:2)
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 (Score:1)
(http://specfic.com/)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law [wikipedia.org]
Re:Words are Meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)