Push Button Paradise

According to this article, BMW Germany used spammy techniques (showing a substantially different page to the crawler than to normal users), and as a result, got kicked out of Google's index.

Let's dive into the semantic murk here. With all the electrons spilled over censorship, I haven't (recently) seen anyone point out that all commercially viable search engines already incorporate something akin to censorship. Spam the index, get banned. Any alternative would quickly result in a tool completely unusable for finding anything at all. Like others, I congratulate Google on applying this evenly, without showing special favor to big corporations.

Now very careful semantics can pull spamming out of the forest of censorship and into the open field, there pummeling it soundly. But it still makes me uneasy when I read disclaimers of all censorship. I don't have a grand point to make here, just noting that it always makes me feel a little uneasy to split hairs that closely. Censorship technology exists big time, and is routinely used for many things. I'd like to see more general discussion on the topic. -m

posted at: 23:51 | under: 2006-02 | 0 comment(s)