Search Engine Death Penalty: WhenU Kicked Off Of Yahoo And Google
from the take-that dept
WhenU, the adware/spyware company that already has quite a bit of controversy surrounding it for both (a) sneaking their software onto users' machines and (b) then popping up competitive ads when surfers visit websites has now been removed from both Yahoo and Google searches after it was determined that they were using tricks to boost their rankings in both. WhenU blames an outside search engine optimizer who they hired, but it does raise some issues. Considering the power that sites like Google and Yahoo have over anyone finding your site, how long will it be until we hear about a lawsuit when someone sues a search engine for kicking their site out of search results?
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I'm actually surprised... by w.h. on May 13th, 2004 @ 10:04pm
.... that it took them this long.
I mean, I'd expect that Google would have a second googlebot that would mimic IE or Netscape just to make sure that the page isn't cloaked.
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No Subject Given by thecaptain on May 14th, 2004 @ 6:01am
Who the hell wants a spyware company to get at a result in a legitimate search anyway?
(unless you're looking for spyware...and even then)
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No Subject Given by NOBODY on May 14th, 2004 @ 7:22am
Only the VC's that they're trying to coax into giving them money.
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Didn't google get sued once by Anonymous Coward on May 14th, 2004 @ 12:19pm
I swear there was some story once about Google getting sued after some dude's website got pulled from the rankings for abusing page rank.
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No Subject Given by jeff on May 14th, 2004 @ 3:55pm
Kazaa asked google to remove kazaa lite (the p2p software that uses no banner ads and hides your url) and google complied. You cannot find the site for kazaa lite with google.
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No Subject Given by Andrew Klossner on May 14th, 2004 @ 4:54pm
You haven't tried it lately, have you?
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Re: Didn't google get sued once by Chris Falco on May 14th, 2004 @ 11:17pm
http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/print.php/1486741
Here's the article when they did get sued.
"In what's believed to be the first lawsuit of its kind, an ad network and search marketer is taking Google to court over changes the popular search engine made to its page-ranking system."
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Googlebot is bandwidth-intensive, slow by Ben Edelman on May 15th, 2004 @ 11:19am
I agree that in principle a second googlebot that mimics IE would be a great advance for Google. If that 'bot only crawled top results for major keywords, it might not even be so hard for Google.
But a couple problems:
1) A far-reaching bot, that crawls deep, would be long, slow, and bandwidth-intensive. Google's existing crawl takes, what, a month (?), though really it's a never-ending task at this point. All indications are that Google is continually facing a constraint as to how much of the web to crawl -- would want to crawl more if it could, seemingly, but continually drops low-pagerank sites in an attempt to focus efforts where they're most needed.
2) Google doesn't look favorably on folks tampering with HTTP headers. But the crawler you propose would have fake HTTP headers (User Agent, Referer, etc.). Google might be uncomfortable with this.
3) The crawler would still come from Google's IP blocks. Some cloaking is based on HTTP headers (user agent or, in WhenU's case as to the research I just posted, Referer header or lack thereof). A second 'bot could catch these tricks. But cloaking on the basis of 'bot IP would be much harder to find: Google would have to use another set of IPs for this project, and once word got out which IPs those were, the smart cloakers would adjust their behavior accordingly.
All in all, I think it's actually not such an easy task. Wouldn't want to be in Google's shoes!
Ben Edelman
benedelman.org
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Google search by Chris Smith on May 4th, 2006 @ 2:54pm
I think it is great. People have to pay lots of money for SEOs. Google is doing great
Chris Smith
abellabooks.com
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