Geeks have been saying for years that Microsoft is “evil”, which tends to come off as a bit overwrought to the less technically-inclined. But today we finally have vindication. From a C|Net interview with Bill Gates:
So that would be the philosophical difference between Microsoft and what Google is up to at this point?
Gates: Well, we don’t know everything they are up to, but we do know their slogan and we disagree with that.
For reference, Google’s slogan is Don’t be evil.
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Wow, Gates must be softening up in his old age. Now he’s actually *admitting* he’s evil.
ROFL! I <3 Bill Gates.
People are lookiong at me for laughing out loud in the computer lab. š That is really teriffic.
For reference, Google’s slogan is: Don’t be evil.
Which they are failing at. Their ‘blog’ search engine? It indexes pages that specifically state “do not index, do not robot, do not bot.” Hell, specifically, “do not googlebot.”
They’re ignoring RFC and they’re ignoring people’s wishes. That’s evil in my book. I plan on posting the copy of a letter to them I am composing.
In their defense, it’s still in beta.
More to the point, how is a blog search engine supposed to *not* index a page? I can think of a few methods, but none of them are foolproof in the slightest, and all depend on word-matching, and even so, contextual errors are easy to imagine.
For example, you might tell the bot to look for the phrase “Do not index” or “don’t index”, but then again, someone might write: “We don’t index our system that way, what was the moron thinking?”
Here’s my thought. When you write in an online journal, and purposefully choose not to lock or friend-lock your posts, you get what you get. Asking not to be included in search results is about as useful, long-term, as asking telemarketers not to call you.
If you don’t want people to read your journal / find your journal….
Don’t make it public.
It’s called robots.txt. It’s a de-facto standard, and it’s considered Very Bad Form in the search community not to respect it.
I just re-read your comment, and I’m wondering if you could elaborate. I’m aware of robots.txt, which, if they are ignoring it, would be a big no-no. But even that isn’t an RFC standard, and I’m not aware of any standard or even convention by which pages themselves can exclude themselves from being indexed.
That would be