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Daniel Brandt |
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#1
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Postmaster ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Regulars Posts: 2,473 Joined: Member No.: 77 ![]() |
The Wikipedia article on Google Watch is a piece of shit. Will some kind soul please nominate it for deletion?
For example, the cookie-expiration line is out of date. For the last 2.5 years, they ostensibly expire in two years. However, Google admits that as the expiration date approaches, they are automatically renewed for another two years. To get the cookie to expire, you have to avoid all Google sites for the entire two years, or wait until your hard disk heads for the dumpster, or delete them yourself. The "Response" section says this: "A May 2003 PC World article described Google Watch as "perhaps justifiably paranoid",[4] however Google's defenders assert that Google Watch offers very little evidence to back up its allegations.[5]" But these citations are six years old! In the seven years since Google-Watch.org began, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of Google critics. If Wikipedia must mention Google Watch, note that it's already mentioned and linked in this Wikipedia article. That's okay by me, because my name isn't on that one. The Wikipedia article on Google-Watch.org is such junk that I decided a year ago to hide the whois for the site behind a proxy. It's downright embarrassing to have my name in that Wikipedia article. But I'm banned from Wikipedia and cannot nominate it myself. (By the way, a person who is banned from Wikipedia should have the right to demand that any article that names him or her be edited to exclude his or her name.) |
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Tarc |
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#2
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Fat Cat ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Regulars Posts: 1,124 Joined: Member No.: 5,309 ![]() |
No purple box, looks like NuclearWafare already added a blurb about GW to the article, and that should be the end of it.
Until someone fires up the inevitable DRV, of course... |
Daniel Brandt |
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#3
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Postmaster ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Regulars Posts: 2,473 Joined: Member No.: 77 ![]() |
No purple box, looks like NuclearWafare already added a blurb about GW to the article, and that should be the end of it. Until someone fires up the inevitable DRV, of course... Okay, now the purple box is gone, but Google_Watch redirects to Criticism_of_Google. Wikipedia's redirects aren't really redirects, and now Criticism_of_Google will show up at number 5 in a search for my name on Google. We went through this when my bio got redirected to the PIR article in June 2007. It took another year to get the PIR article deleted. I say kill the redirect. It's the only way to purge this link to my name in Google's index. Anything that's on the first page of Google's results in a search for my name, is like low-hanging fruit for the Mark Binmores out there. You will start to see ugly lines about me in Criticism_of_Google that will persist for months or years. |
Random832 |
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#4
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meh ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Regulars Posts: 1,933 Joined: Member No.: 4,844 ![]() |
Okay, now the purple box is gone, but Google_Watch redirects to Criticism_of_Google. Wikipedia's redirects aren't really redirects, and now Criticism_of_Google will show up at number 5 in a search for my name on Google. As I've pointed out every time you've said this in the past, this has nothing to do with not being real redirects because Google gives the same treatment to real redirects. Maybe even more so since the page rank of both pages combines. But, more to the point - unlike the time when there was a redirect from your name to the PIR article, your name isn't in this URL. And "google juice" doesn't stay permanently with a page as the content changes, as I'm sure you learned while refining your google-manipulation techniques. As long as the article doesn't mention your name, it should drop off the google results quickly. (Did the PIR article ever not mention your name?) This post has been edited by Random832: |
Daniel Brandt |
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#5
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Postmaster ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Regulars Posts: 2,473 Joined: Member No.: 77 ![]() |
Okay, now the purple box is gone, but Google_Watch redirects to Criticism_of_Google. Wikipedia's redirects aren't really redirects, and now Criticism_of_Google will show up at number 5 in a search for my name on Google. As I've pointed out every time you've said this in the past, this has nothing to do with not being real redirects because Google gives the same treatment to real redirects. Maybe even more so since the page rank of both pages combines. But, more to the point - unlike the time when there was a redirect from your name to the PIR article, your name isn't in this URL. And "google juice" doesn't stay permanently with a page as the content changes, as I'm sure you learned while refining your google-manipulation techniques. As long as the article doesn't mention your name, it should drop off the google results quickly. (Did the PIR article ever not mention your name?) And I pointed out to you that if my name is in the anchor text of the links pointing to the page (and now that page is the Criticism page, not the original Google_Watch article), then this matters more than whether the name is on the page itself. I noticed this back in 2002. One blogger in Italy stuck my name in the title of one post, and his blog post shot up to number one in a search for my name. Do a search for "namebase" in Google. The Public Interest Registry is number 6. I sold the pir.org domain to the Registry in early 2003. There were three full months of redirects to namebase.org written into the contract. I also spent a huge number of hours asking everyone I could find who linked to namebase when it was pir.org, to change their link to namebase.org. Almost seven years later, what do we see? It's still at number 6. The word "namebase" is nowhere on the pir.org site, and hasn't been since I sold the domain. Is seven years — and still going strong — what you mean by "dropping off the Google results quickly"? Here's another example: My name is not on the wikipedia-watch.org home page and hasn't been for about two years. Yet that page comes up number one in a search for my name. Why do you think that happens? It's because external links pointing to that page contain my name in the anchor text (or maybe in close proximity to the anchor text, like in the same sentence). The external links that pointed to the Google_Watch article caused it to show up at number 5 on Google in a search for my name. Yes my name was on that page once, in tiny print. But much more significantly, the external links pointing to that Wikipedia article are providing juice for my name. Now those same external links are providing that exact same juice for my name as it points to the Criticism article. That article doesn't contain my name, but I doubt that this will make a difference. Moreover, can you guarantee that no one will ever insert my name in that article? Yes, my name was in the PIR article. But that wasn't the most important factor. As soon as the redirect from the bio to PIR was in place, the PIR article slammed into first place for a search on my name. The juice from my name in the PIR article helped somewhat, but the major juice was my name in or close to the anchor text of external links — the links that used to point to my bio. Now they all pointed to the PIR article. The redirect has to come down, and I'll keep fighting to get it taken down. The question isn't how much you or I know, or don't know, about Google. The real question is why does Wikipedia have to make it so hard for me to get off of their damn site? |
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