Google Purges The People's Cube Worldwide

thepeoplescube.com ^ | 3/10/2006 | Red Square

[the anti-liberal]

Open letter #2 to Google from the People's Cube
(posted on Google.com Help Center at 8:30pm on March 10, 2006

"Out of sight, out of mind" - translated into Russian and then back into English, the idiom turns into "invisible lunatics." That also describes The People's Cube's search results in Google.

Dear comrades at Google: At some point, quite recently, our popular site "The People's Cube" (ThePeoplesCube.com) was purged from Google search results. MSN , Yahoo and other search engines still have it - but Google has erased/blocked any link to the site in its database. One can still find links to us from other sites - but not even one from Google to ThePeoplesCube.com. We tried American, French, German, British, Australian, and Russian versions of Google - they used to give us traffic only a few days ago - but all we got was the same line in various languages: Sorry, no information is available for the URL thepeoplescube.com. And if we clicked on Find web pages from the site thepeoplescube.com we got Your search - site:thepeoplescube.com - did not match any documents.

~

The first time we saw this line it was written in Chinese - 对不起，找不到网址 thepeoplescube.com 的信息。 We used to look up The People's Cube for fun in the communist-censored Google China only weeks ago - and reported it on our site in a story called Google's Great Leap Forward. Of course our site was blocked by the Chinese government, with Google's consent, along with legions of other Western sites - but we couldn't imagine that only a few weeks later we would get the same results in English. The last time we checked we still lived in the United States - not China - but hey, whoever controls the information is the boss.

If it were a glitch in an algorithm it might throw our rankings back to the end of the line - but this is a total removal. We suspect it is also a deliberate removal - much in the spirit of 1984-style historical revisionism - removal of a "people's enemy" from life and history. Sergei Brin's Russian parents might tell him stories of people in Stalinist Russia disappearing, along with all their pictures and records. "Out of sight, out of mind" - translated into Russian and then back into English, the idiom turns into "invisible lunatics." That also describes The People's Cube's search results in Google.

We can only think of three reasons for this:

1. Google is retaliating against sites that ridiculed its Google China project.
2. Google has begun to implement its Google China policies in the rest of the free world.
3. A left-leaning Google employee who's got access to the database was suffering a nervous breakdown over the mockery of Marxism on our site, and so he or she dastardly removed/blocked The People's Cube, hoping to "improve" the public discourse by silencing the competition.

You tell me which one it is.

The People's Cube is a business corporation selling products on the Internet. A drop in traffic, caused by a malicious tempering with search results, has affected sales and that gives us grounds for you-know-what.

We'll start by posting this letter on our site and wait for your reply. We'll gladly drop the matter and similarly drop this post into the "memory hole" if we get a quick response from you and our high rankings in Google get immediately restored. An apology would be nice as well.

If you can, we'd appreciate if you pass the following word to our former compatriot Sergei Brin: "Seriozhka, konchai duraka valat' - bylo vremia kogda my toboi gordilis'!" (Sergie, stop making a fool out of yourself, we used to be proud of you!)

Keep the Cube rolling,
Comrade Red Square

[ordinaryguy]

Lots of sites are experiencing things like this right now with Google. It may have to do with their new 'Big Daddy' infrastructure.

It really does demonstrate how much power Google has, though. If you've based your business on Google traffic, these things can keep you awake at night.

[the anti-liberal]

You're very welcome - now if enough people do this maybe google and others who would do the same (including yahoo) will take notice.

For those of you with Firefox, here are links to add alltheweb and clusty to your search bar.

[the anti-liberal]

And here's a link to hack that "Allows uninstalling search plugins - just right click on a search plugin and choose 'Delete'":

Firefox Extension

[Restorer]

Google doesn't give "ad space" away. They sell it. Why not contact them and see if "Winchester" is available for you to purchase click-through advertising on?

Maybe nobody has purchased advertising for this word.

[the anti-liberal]

Interesting.

When I was reading the open letter, here posted, the address in the 'address bar' was 'http://www.thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?t=637'.

They're back, btw.

[processing please hold]

The clutzy one looks good. Do you use it and is it ok? I'm sick to death of google.

[jdm]

"What is "ThePeople'sCube"? I've never heard of it."

[DBrow]

Point was, type in "beretta" and get no paid-for google ads. Type in "nikon" and you get ads. Type in Foxy Methoxy and you used to get ads for Duncanlabs, RACResearch, Omegafinechemichals and a dozen others.

My understanding is that google does not accept ads for firearms, part of their "do no evil" philosophy.

I was contrasting that in my post with their ready acceptance of paid ads for potent dope like tryptamines and phenylethtlamines- which were OK to the "do no evil" company until their customers got busted.

[Rocko]

What is "ThePeople'sCube"? I've never heard of it.

One of the better parody blogs around.

[the anti-liberal]

clusty is good - and so is alltheweb, I tend to use alltheweb more often, but usually which ever is on top in my search bar. I've completely removed google from Firefox, and haven't missed it at all.

If you're sick to death, then good God man, switch before you die!

[Slainte]

Google hasn't done a very good of implementing this particular memory hole. While they whacked thepeoplescube.com from the index, a search for "thepeoplescube" (no .com) still turns up 16,500 results, and it is unlikely that someone slipped and accidentally typed 'thepeoplescube' on their gardening blog when they meant to type 'cucumber.'

It'll be interesting to see if those 16,500 results that mention the site start dropping from the index as well.

[the anti-liberal]

Thanks for pointing me to http://www.acoona.com, I'm going to add it.

[processing please hold]

I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna try doing it. Me and computers are not very compatible.

[the anti-liberal]

Hmm. Do any of those 16,500 results actually point to 'thepeoplescube.com'? In any case, I never use google, so I'll not be seeing what happens with this. "Out of site, out of mind", heh heh...

[the anti-liberal]

Do it as if your life depended on it! ;^)

After a while, you'll not miss google at all. I sure don't.

[zeugma]

I just went to google and noticed the google graphic was different from what it usually is, so I clicked on it. It took me to Google Mars.

It's like Google Earth, but with less buildings and roads :-) 

 

[Palladin]

Thanks for the Clusty link. I like the way it is organized.

[SkyDancer]

That's why I use Dog Pile, Copernic, and other search engins. I'm deleting Google from my computer.

[the anti-liberal]

I tried dog pile, but most of the searches include google and yahoo returns. In effect, by using dog pile, you're using both google and yahoo at the same time.

Ergo I don't use dog pile. But that's just me...