The Right To Be Forgotten

A while back some judge decided that people could ask the search engines to de-index certain references to themselves as no longer relevant in the modern age. As I see things, the search engines are using that decision to their own advantage.

 

Forgive me for being vague about the details – I can’t get results to show up in searches, and I will tell you why I think that is. The search engines want some information to be forgotten. If my memory is right, this regards a court case in NC around 2006-2007.

 

About ten years ago a group of website owners brought a group action against Google, because they believed that Google was favoring larger, well established sites over new sites with better content. The judge decided they were right, and found their case proven.

I don’t know what passed between the judge and Google after the decision. I do know that for a couple of years after that it was possible to get an Adsense account very easily, then run ads on a five page site for a while and make money from Adsense.

 

Ten years ago it was possible to deceive the search engines in many ways, and there were a lot of sites with autofeeds and spun content which were also making money.  Those sites needed eliminating – but Google went in with their “updates” and eliminated a lot more. In these post-Panda days you can’t start small and get big, because small sites get placed so far down the search pages you have to pump air to them.

The current situation is more annoying for small site owners than it was ten years ago, because, although the abilities of the spiders have been improved, the spiders still can’t read. You can be giving the best and most informative info on the web from your site, but if it doesn’t come with two irrelevant pictures and a video on each page, the spiders will ignore it. The spiders cannot rate the REAL INFORMATION if it comes as text.

The search engines are back to favoring large sites again. There is a legal precedent against this, but you can’t find it through a normal websearch, because it is not in the interests of any of the big search engines to show it.  The search companies want it to be forgotten – and it is as if it never happened.