Google Acknowledges What A Mess This Is | Hacker News Reader

Google Acknowledges What A Mess This Is

huskyseo.co.uk

1 pointhuskyseo4 comments

robots.txt would have been the only reasonable option: force publishers to dereference content by putting censored content in their robots.txt file...

It's a scalable solution, already implemented by Google for this exact purpose: publishers can choose what they want indexed.

Don't you share my pov?

If you mean: when Some Guy complains that publisher.com/somePage turns up in search results for Some Guy, publisher.com should put Disallow: /somePage in their robots.txt, then I don't share your POV, because google can still index publisher.com/somePage under the stupid EU law. They are just not allowed to show it in results for the specific search: Some Guy

Suppose publisher.com/somePage has the following content:

   So, Some Guy did this really bad thing in November 1963.

and Some Guy successfully complains to have this page removed from search results on his name.

Then searches for really bad thing November 1963 would, and should, under the current implementation of the stupid EU law, turn up publisher.com/somePage in the results. Just not searches for Some Guy.

Robots.txt isn't flexible enough to allow this, I think.

Then it's not as broad (and clever) as I thought. Some Guy will not be forgotten at all, ie. the law will be useless.

This law doesn't scale at all.

A search for "Some Guy" on the publisher's website or another search engine will return "somePage".

IMHO, Stupid law, custom made to piss Google.

Yeah, it's just dumb. Indeed, a search for "Some Guy" on the US version of google will also return somePage. To circumvent this legal provision, as a UK net user, you only have to go to http://google.com/ncr so that you use google.com instead of google.co.uk. Once done, your search results are no longer restricted.

So yes, unbelievably dumb and useless. Rivaled in dumbness only by the EU Privacy Directive, AKA the "stupid EU cookie law".

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