Displaying posts in the Internet category.

Web site responsible for Google summary

Well, in the Netherlands, that is. This is what happened.

Klup.nl is a Dutch web site for people looking for a house. It apparently once posted some text about a car dealer named Zwartepoorte, and somewhere on the same page, another text about the bankruptcy of a totally different company. The two texts had nothing to do with each other, nor did it appear that way on the web site.

Google, in their everlasting effort to index everything, crawled the page with the mentioned texts, and generated an unfortunate summary for the page that suggested that the car dealer was bankrupt. This summary was shown when searching for “Zwartepoorte failliet” (failliet meaning bankrupt in Dutch). It appeared beneath the link to to said page on Klup.nl in the search results (you know, those grey summaries we all see every day). The summary goes as follows:

volledige naam: Zwartepoorte specialiteit BMW…Dit bedrijf is failliet verklaard, het is overgenomen door het motorhuis (…)

Literally translated: “full name: Zwartepoorte specialty BMW…This company has been declared bankrupt, it has been acquired by the motor house (…)”.

So far, there’s nothing wrong. Until John Zwartepoorte, CEO of the car dealer, used the query mentioned above on Google, and found the summary suggesting his company was bankrupt. So he sued Klup.nl, the site that originally posted both texts.

Weird, you think? Well, not according to the judge. He made a consideration between the right of free speech (don’t ask me what free speech has to do with Google botching up some text) and the interests of Zwartepoorte, and ruled 1 that Klup.nl was indeed responsible for Google’s summary.

That’s not all, though. Free speech is a constitutional right in the Netherlands, and it has always been very liberal, there weren’t many things one couldn’t say. Discrimination and slander are some of the few things that do not fall under free speech. This judge now added to that, than whenever Google pulls things out of context, the original text must be adjusted. Rather futile, I might add, because there’s no knowing what kind of summary Google will generate for the new text on its next crawl.

Well, luckily there’s the possibility of appeal, which the owner of Klup.nl is of course pursuing. But as it is, until the appeal has been treated in court, this verdict stands. Let’s just hope Google doesn’t generate any “unfortunate” summaries of my site… ;)

1. This page is in Dutch, here’s a translation by Google.

Easter egg

On my home served web site, raptor’s playground, I’ve hidden an easter egg. Find it, and you’ll earn eternal fame (and your name listed on the home page). :)

Google thinks I live in San Francisco?

Today, in San Francisco an event called “Lights Out San Francisco” takes place. Basically, everyone there is asked to turn off al their lights except for one compact fluorescent lamp between 20:00 and 21:00 hours tonight, to raise awareness of the need to reduce energy consumption.

Google supports this initiative by serving a black home page to people living in the San Francisco Bay area.

Google users in the San Francisco Bay Area will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a citywide energy conservation event called Lights Out San Francisco.

http://www.google.com/lightsoutsf/

Well, I don’t live anywhere near San Francisco, but I am treated with a (rather ugly) black Google home page:

a screen shot of the Google home page with a black background

Google with lights off

So far nothing really special. But apparently, everyone else I’ve asked gets the standard white home page. I haven’t pulled off any tricks, I’m not connecting though a proxy, and my IP address is a Dutch one. In fact, Google redirects me to www.google.nl when I visit www.google.com if I don’t turn that off manually (by visiting www.google.com/ncr once). So Google actually knows my IP address is a Dutch one. Everyone else with a Dutch IP seems to get the white home page.

:-)

:-)

I know, this deserves some explanation. :P

Today is the 25th birthday of the :-). I stumbled upon that page a while ago, remembered it just now, and was fortunate enough to find it in my browser history. :)

I just thougt it was worth a little remembrance, because I use smilies all too often. :)

And something of a whole different matter: users can comment without registration again. I got myself an Akismet API key (why haven’t I done that sooner? :? ) so spam should no longer be a big issue.

Google facelift

A few days ago, I noticed that Google’s front page has had a facelift. Upon futher examining this, it seems than only google.com has been updated. Localized Google front pages (like google.nl or google.be) seem to still use the old layout.

For those using a localized version of Google, this is what google.com looks like now:

a screen shot of the new Google front page

Google front page

Or you could go to google.com/ncr to see it yourself (this link prevents redirecting to your localized Google version).