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davorg (18)

davorg
  dave@dave.org.uk
http://dave.org.uk/
Yahoo! ID: daveorguk (Add User, Send Message)

Hacker, author, trainer

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Journal of davorg (18)

Saturday February 28, 2004
10:09 AM

The Curse of Google

[ #17673 ]

Sometimes have a high Google placing can be a curse instead of a blessing. Recently I discovered that a rather uncomplimentary piece I wrote about the magazine Zoo Weekly was coming out top in a Google search for "zoo weekly". This meant that I got quite a few Zoo readers leaving comments on my blog.

Now someone from a training company in London has discovered that a Google search for the company name leads to a rather unflattering discussion about them on the london.pm mailing list. And he's asking for the posts to be removed.


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  • Do you know which IP address range they are looking from? If so, one evil thing to do is to arrange the server to send 404s to that range, and the pages to others. However this will come unstuck if they look from (say) home.

    Presumably googlebot's grasp of robots.txt is good enough that it could be told it's not allowed to look at those two specifc messages, which would cause them to fall off the google search, which is what they seem to care about.

    However, I fail to see what is libelous about those two me

  • I have to agree with nicholas---there's no reason to remove anything. If the facts are, well, facts, then they should be upset that they put themselves in this sort of situation. If they're not, it's too bad, but sometimes the internet contains information that isn't true. (No, really.)

    I don't understand that reaction ("omg remove posts about me!"), but I hear about it a lot. There is no more wretched hive of scum and villainy than the internet, and the fact that people are capable of getting frothed u
    --
    rjbs
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