I'm sorry, but I have to respectfully disagree here. What you're looking at is not, as you put it: "an unknowing or ignorant TOS violation" nor have they been "flushed down the memory hole". thepeoplescube.com attempted to game the system by including a bunch of text to push up their page ranking (as well as duplicating a bunch of links) and then hiding them using CSS slight-of-hand. I'm sure they though they were pretty damn slick nowithstanding the fact that it's a trick that dates back to Altavista in the late 90s. Or maybe they paid a bunch of money to a consultant who told them this was a quick way to synthetic popularity. In any event, Google noticed and stopped indexing them. As soon as thepeoplescube.com gets rid of the spam, they're back in the index - requests for reinclusion are acted upon in a quite quick fashion. The notion that this was an innocent mistake fails the basic plausibility test.
The PRC business is one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't sort of things. In some ways I suppose it's preferable to turn one's back on China and keep the moral high ground. That's what I think I would have done in Google's place, but I can't say for sure because I haven't been there.
Refusal to cooperate with DOJ's fishing expedition and divulge Google trade secrets in the process is an action which should be applauded by civil libertarians and GOOG.O stockholders alike. There is a very real concern that the DOJ is not following the guidelines set out in 18 USC 2703 (that's the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which has been around for 20 years now). Now, you have to understand that I *like* President Bush and am generally a fan of our foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet I find the Administration's apparent decision to play it fast and loose with adherance to statutory law in both this case and the NSA/FISA Court case... troubling. Google is doing the right thing by refusing to play ball. Yahoo and friends should have done their part to see to it that appropriate case law comes into being; instead, they rolled over.
Probably best to not comment on the "don't be evil" bit. When you're public, nobody believes that bullshit anymore either. :-/
no subject
"an unknowing or ignorant TOS violation" nor have they been "flushed down the memory hole". thepeoplescube.com attempted to game the system by including a bunch of text to push up their page ranking (as well as duplicating a bunch of links) and then hiding them using CSS slight-of-hand. I'm sure they though they were pretty damn slick nowithstanding the fact that it's a trick that dates back to Altavista in the late 90s. Or maybe they paid a bunch of money to a consultant who told them this was a quick way to synthetic popularity. In any event, Google noticed and stopped indexing them. As soon as thepeoplescube.com gets rid of the spam, they're back in the index - requests for reinclusion are acted upon in a quite quick fashion. The notion that this was an innocent mistake fails the basic plausibility test.
The PRC business is one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't sort of things. In some ways I suppose it's preferable to turn one's back on China and keep the moral high ground. That's what I think I would have done in Google's place, but I can't say for sure because I haven't been there.
Refusal to cooperate with DOJ's fishing expedition and divulge Google trade secrets in the process is an action which should be applauded by civil libertarians and GOOG.O stockholders alike. There is a very real concern that the DOJ is not following the guidelines set out in 18 USC 2703 (that's the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which has been around for 20 years now). Now, you have to understand that I *like* President Bush and am generally a fan of our foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet I find the Administration's apparent decision to play it fast and loose with adherance to statutory law in both this case and the NSA/FISA Court case... troubling. Google is doing the right thing by refusing to play ball. Yahoo and friends should have done their part to see to it that appropriate case law comes into being; instead, they rolled over.
Probably best to not comment on the "don't be evil" bit. When you're public, nobody believes that bullshit anymore either. :-/
--RS