Google de-indexes 3k articles over bogus DMCA notice

This is may be complicated by the fact the site appears a bit of a content farm itself. The article immediately following this one in their news section is

https://www.wheelsjoint.com/toyota-to-cut-production-by-40-p...

Which looks like an unattributed re-written Bloomberg piece with the added twist that they misspelled the name of the Toyota purchasing manager in question.

Edit: There was a WSJ article about Google's problems with fake DMCA notices last year, discussed then at:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23195680

> Submitting DMCA takedown notices for thousands of URLs to Google is easier than you think. You just have to fill out a DMCA form available on Google’s website and you can include 1000 URLs in each notice. The form includes a text field which accepts 1000 URLs at once.

> But if you want to submit a counter DMCA notice, you have to submit one URL at a time. Submitting over 3,000 URLs took us over 15 hours – while it would have taken the scammer a few minutes to submit those URLs.

Now if that design isn't intentionally abusive on Googles part. I think it at least qualifies as a dark pattern.

And once again HN becomes the escalation end point for Google support. I wish they’d throw the internet a bone and put 1% of revenue into support.

Edit: I do t actually know how much they invest in support. It may be a lot higher than 1%. Regardless, the number of “Google screwed me and won’t answer the phone.” articles we see is scary.

It's painful how much of this is "on schedule" to achieve circa 2000s doomsayer's dystopia. Make gateways to the internet, they become gates.

Whether it's advertising/monetisation policies, getting suddenly buried in their corporate bureaucracy, content moderation or whatnot... it's clear that you're dealing with a monopolith gatekeeper.

What a mess, and all for what? To protect creators? How far we are from any such goal.

The title should be " Google deletes 3k articles from its search results over bogus DMCA notice "

Not again I get that these tech companies work on volume and automation and to manually review everything would be impossible and the more avenue of contact they put in the more they get swamped with noise, but they could do a lot more to identify real people with accounts of real value and have people that they can call to get these problems resolved without it having to cause a social media stink. I don't think they realise how much stories like this make me want to use other products, because it doesn't usually quite cross the threshold of making me do it, but it has done on occasion it would do more often if there were more alternatives. It really can't be good for their business model to have potentially lots of people even slightly motivated to go elsewhere just waiting for a viable alternative.

An unpleasant reinforcement of my decision to avoid anything Google—these folks have been cut off from revenue and search with absolutely zero recourse.

In a better future, we'll look back on copyright's dark ages - when decades of purchased legislation shaped it to become a tool for censorship and gatekeeping.

If google can be so easily fooled, perhaps the easy way to get attention to this problem is to submit similar bogus claims en masse against very high profile sites - major players like wsj, Fox News, bbc, etc. Of course doing so would be illegal…

With a coordinated effort, and assuming the google system is fully automated and apparently very stupid, it might be possible to wipe half of the major sites off google for a period.

They don't care if a few eggs are broken, chalk it up to the price of progress for eliminating the overhead of vetting requests. Money in the bank. Maybe flooding Google with fraudulent requests would force them to take the issue of seriously. The moment overhead of litigation stemming from fraudulent requests exceeds that of legitimate requests they'll fix that problem. For that reason perhaps some individuals collaborating to build network of bots which systematically flag everything indiscriminately with DMCA takedown requests would be justified.

As of now it's pretty easy for Google to ignore the issue. One of many reasons corporations achieving the size of Alphabet inevitably becomes anti-consumer. They don't hear claims of fraud over the din of golden coins dropping into their accounts. I'd wager if Google Ads and Youtube were independent corporation they'd take supporting their customers and fraud a lot more seriously.

I was thinking about this earlier. I’ll give the idea away because I don’t have the time to build it. We should tokenize search. We can store data like location, trust score and reviews. Currently search is pruning a lot of things for the sake of money alone. Has anyone noticed a reduction in quality results and an increase in repetitive content? the current algorithm is terrible. If you are reading this google, rollback or fix the AI influence on search. It has become a lot harder to discover new content with this algorithm. And it seems to be punishing the wrong content. Just my two cents

> after receiving 4 DMCA notices by “info-bloom.site”, a website that does not exist

There is a similarly-named website which still exists, `what-info-bloom.com`, and which currently appears to be a copycat of `wheelsjoint.com`.

*de-indexes

I thought the DMCA had provisions for fines against people filing fraudulent/bogus claims. Wonder if these folks have explored that.

Search should be the native feature of the Web itself (even if it's just basic), just like any other discovery protocol.

Looks like a vulnerability. No such term as "DMCAing" (like SWATting) or "DDMCA" (like DDOS) yet?

Google did not delete the articles. I found them just fine on duckduckgo.com

Title is pretty stupid. The articles weren't deleted. Nobody has a "right" to be indexed by Google.