Google bits: redactions and spam
Links, Weblogs May 12th, 2004 |Two interesting Google-related bits today.
Firstly, a paragraph about outsourcing jobs mysteriously disappeared from the Google Weblog at some point during the day. Mark Pilgrim pointed this out (along with /., MeFi, and Hello Typepad) and quite rightly took Google to task for the unremarked changes:
This kind of revisionist history is unacceptable, regardless of who does it. If you don’t want it saved for all time, don’t publish it on the Internet. Putting “blog” on the top of the page does not absolve you of all responsibility.
NetNewsWire’s “show changes” feature caught the edits, though, so here’s a quick screen capture showing just how the post was reworded:
The second bit is more on the amusing side, and has less to do directly with Google. I got a piece of comment spam earlier that, when I looked at it, made me laugh, simply because in an effort to make it look almost like a real comment, the spammer had mixed links in with a paragraph of real text. It just so happens that the paragraph they chose was one from Google’s website, discussing how pages are indexed after being submitted to Google. I’ve replaced the links with bolded text in the following snippet, of course:
When a URL is submitted to Google, Sex Toy Shop we look for it in our Hotel Booking next crawl. If Low Interest Credit Card you’ve already submitted your Buy Cialis URL, your site could easily Atkins Diet appear in our new index, which will go Nude Celebrity up when the current crawl is completed. However, Online Casinos if no other site links to yours, it Dating Personals may be difficult for our crawler to find Tag Watch you. Conversely, if many sites link to Seiko Watch your page, there is a good Car Hire chance we will find you without your submitting your Register Domain Name URL. Occasionally, websites are not reachable Ladies Watches when we try to crawl them because of Coral Bookmaker network or hosting problems.
It almost makes sense when you read it…
iTunes: “Another One Bites the Dust (Wyclef Jean)” by Queen feat. Free/Jean, Wyclef/Pras from the album Small Soldiers (1998, 4:22).
[See also: Untrusted content, nofollow, etc. | More site work | Now with Markdown | rel=“nofollow” : Massive weblog anti-spam initiative | It’s astounding, time is fleeting… ]
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James
Greg
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May 12th, 2004 at 6:47 am
Hrmm… I just don’t see this as “revisionist history”… This is hardly the equivalent of a 1984-esque campaign to rewrite the past… sometimes when you blog something, it doesn’t come out the way you intend it to sound… and re-reading it after the fact (or getting somebody’s feedback on it) gives you a perspective on what you should have said instead. I almost always just go back and re-write the original entry, as opposed to writing a new one or posting a correction, and I know TONS of other webloggers do this as well. Why should we hold the googleblog to a higher standard than other blogs? They could just not put their blog up at all, would that be better?
May 12th, 2004 at 9:33 am
I think in this case, there are a few considerations at play that made me raise my eyebrows at the changes.
First off, the Googleblog is a corporate blog, not a personal blog. As such, yes, I do think that we should hold them to a somewhat higher standard — as “informal” as they may try to make it, it’s still a voice of the company as a whole and not any particular person (this is made even stronger by the fact that aside from the first post that was signed by Evan, all posts are posted without an authorial byline).
Secondly, outsourcing is currently a very touchy subject, especially in the tech sector. When unemployment is as high as it is right now and so many qualified people are unable to find good jobs, seeing companies save a few bucks by sending work overseas grates on many people’s nerves. This feeling can easily get stronger when it is triggered by a company like Google, who used to be something of a “poster child” for good geek-friendly companies — seen by many as something of an anti-Microsoft — but lately has been making moves that have prompting more of a love-hate relationship for many people.
Lastly, there’s a big difference between the quick fix of an occasional misspelled word or clumsy sentence and the wholesale rewriting of an entire paragraph or post so that it ends up making a very different statement than when it was originally published.
I don’t think this was an “evil” thing, but given the high visibility of the Googleblog and the touchy nature of the subject, the changes could have been handled in a better way than just seemingly sneaking them in and hoping it wasn’t noticed.
May 12th, 2004 at 10:05 am
The Google Blog
As nearly everyone in the world has noticed, Google has a blog now. It’s too bad they didn’t go with the /blog/ URI because this one has extra redundant redundancy, and that doesn’t seem very Google-like. The new blog is very generic, it barely seem…
May 12th, 2004 at 12:40 pm
Google caught with it’s hand in it’s blog cookie jar
This picture shows how Google revised a bit of it’s blog’s history already.
May 12th, 2004 at 12:40 pm
Blogger News Item
This picture shows how Google revised a bit of it’s blog’s history already.
May 13th, 2004 at 10:18 am
I guess changing the original may be seen by some as, “We never said that.” To me the edit makes the statement, “We wish we hadn’t said that.”
May 17th, 2004 at 12:32 pm
Google… History’s Revisionists
GoogleBlog gets a quick edit. http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/726500
December 28th, 2004 at 2:18 am
Clearly this is another example of one of the growing pains a company that has risen so fast might have to go through. Although eager to be a young, flying by the seat-of-your pants organization, Google as a $50+ billion public company has to straddle with also being a big, process-oriented, PR-conscious corporation. Processes, checks and balances take years to develop where google is a on a growth curve that no other company has ever really seen.