"I couldn't really put out the fire, so I had to keep fueling it," Sheen said on Friday on NBC's "Today" show. He told host Matt Lauer that he regrets claiming he had "tiger blood" and "Adonis DNA," calling them jokes and metaphors that he never really believed.
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Ron Paul was roundly booed at the GOP debate after very unpopular comments about US foreign policies in the Arab world.
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The search for 8-year-old Joshua Robb, the California autistic boy who was missing during a night of lightning storms, ended this afternoon when a search and rescue team found him in the woods near his school after playing recordings of Ozzy Osbourne.
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Yesterday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal endorsed Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Today, on the Hugh Hewitt Show he admitted that he disagreed with Perry over the HPV vaccination policy, the border fence with Mexico and the free tuition policy for illegal immigrants. He also reiterated his full endorsement for Gov. Perry for President.
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Egypt's army rulers vowed on Saturday to try those behind the violence that drove Israel to evacuate its ambassador from Cairo, struggling to contain public fury against the Jewish state while fending off US criticism. Washington, which has poured billions of dollars of military aid into Egypt since it made peace with Israel in 1979, urged Cairo to protect the mission after protesters hurled embassy documents and the Israeli flag from the windows of the building.
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Former presidential candidate Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) endorses his former rival Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination.
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This morning, James Breckenridge discovered a loophole within Google’s Webmaster Tools that allowed anyone to remove any site from Google.
Both James and I sent this information to Google as soon as we heard of it. After several hours, Google has told us, “we’re still investigating this report, and to be cautious we disabled all URL removals earlier this morning.” So now, if you even own a site, you won’t be able to remove the site or pages from the site using Google’s URL removal tool.
How did this loophole work? Pretty simple as James described. You use the following URL when logged into Google Webmaster Tools:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals-request?hl=en&siteUrl=http://{YOUR_URL}/&urlt={URL_TO_BLOCK}
Then replace {YOUR_URL} with a URL you control within Webmaster Tools, and replace {URL_TO_BLOCK} with the URL of the site you want to block.
You could block a whole site, section or single page this way, based on how you entered the URL. To block a site, use the top level domain (E.g. http://www.someurl.com/), to block a section (subfolder) use a subfolder URL (E.g. http://www.someurl.com/somefolder/) and to block a page use the specific page URL (E.g. http://www.someurl.com/somefolder/somepage.html).
I am waiting an update from Google on why this happened, if site’s were impacted and how long this was an issue.
Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Blocking Spiders | SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites | SEO: Spamming | Top News
About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz
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I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the Belgian newspapers in this matter. From my own viewpoint, in an admitted self-serving way, I don’t like it when I do a search for something, find a relevant link, and then end up hitting a pay-wall or a ‘…you must first register…’ landing site to read whatever was shown in the search result I clicked on. Google has been getting more and more bloated recently where searches are often populated with lots of junk and I appreciate the fact that they are addressing this issue. These newspapers just want to manipulate Google search results to bait readers to their sites but not allow us access without paying or fiddling with that annoying enter-an-email-address-then-do-the-confirmation process. They want a pervasive online presence with all take but no give.
As long as Google was only a transparent search-engine to the web their dominant position was no big deal (except for competing ad-brokers).
But it seems that Google now is on a power-trip and is using exclusion as a threat/whip to make websites comply with Googles whishes as to what business-model a website should use and (above all) to support other Google services.
An example is Googles refusal to support paywall-based sites. This is not that it couldn’t be done nicely but that Google wants everyone to use an ad-based business-model that benefit the Google ad-broker business.
This is now becoming a problem when Google is becomes even more of a destination than it already is (Google+). They should breakout the search engine to make it independent and transparent or the EU will force them to do it.
Remember that the Google Android scorched-earth approach to forcing everyone else off the mobil-software/services market probably does not sit well with the EU.
Please note it’s not all Belgian newspapers, only french-speaking ones..
I’m with Google on this one btw. Keep the web open for everyone.
“Please note it’s not all Belgian newspapers, only french-speaking ones..”
Look it up: PRECEDENT
“I’m with Google on this one btw. Keep the web open for everyone.”
Hmmmmm…unless they make enough to pay their writers, there will be nothing to “keep open.”
Next time, Copiepresse should read the verdict of the judge http://bit.ly/qKPibV see section V
IANASEE (I Am Not A Search Engine Expert)
What about the NOFOLLOW, NOARCHIVE, and NOINDEX meta tags?
I would think using them would be an acceptable compromise for the newspapers (unless the newspapers’ web admins have no idea what they’re doing; also, it’s possible that indexing and archiving at Google News without asking for permission in the first place is enough to get Google in trouble. That sounds reasonable to me, unless Google considers the open nature of the web to be sort of an “unspoken agreement” that you’re allowing them to index and archive your material, for search purposes. I don’t know.)
Also, I’m told that the Search Bot and News Bot are two different agents. So it would be possible for the papers to discriminate between them, even allow other search engines that have signed agreements with them to index and archive them (allowing in their User Agents), and keep Google News Bot out of their sites (but not Google Search Bot).
Anyway, apparently the court order does say “ALL GOOGLE SITES”, so obviously Google is going to comply (the alternative being “interpreting” Copiepresse’s intentions about Google Search, and being open to being screwed on a technicality. Google whining that the newspapers didn’t want to be excluded from Search wouldn’t help them if the judge says “I SAID ALL GOOGLE WEBSITES” and slaps them with a million euros fine per day.)
I just looked at the ruling (a bit). It mentions NOARCHIVE, but it says Google didn’t explain how it would prevent the Google News Bot from indexing the title and summary of the news article (maybe NOINDEX would do that). Also, it does consider that explicit prior permission is required to do anything with the articles (“apparent” implicit permission or license does not count; this is reasonable, or at least it’s what the law says today). An interesting point in the ruling is that if authors had to LEGALLY depend on technological measures (such as meta tags) to prevent exploitation of their work then they would have no legal recourse if they didn’t use these technological measures. I think this is fair. Authors and publishers DO use technological measures to prevent piracy, but that doesn’t mean it’s legal to distribute a work without permission if it doesn’t have some sort of DRM protection.
From the ruling (link posted by commenter Béate Vervaecke):
“- Orders GOOGLE to withdraw from all its sites (and more
specifically from Google News and as far as the Google web
search engine is concerned the visible cached links)…”
Hmm. I’m not so sure about Google’s position anymore. Sure, it does say “all its sites”, but after that comes the clarification and it seems it treats web search as an exception, only asking for the removal of the “visible cached links”. Maybe the judge could’ve used clearer language, but it doesn’t seem like Google needed to react like it did (IANABLOAKOLFTM – I Am Not A Belgian Lawyer Or Any Kind Of Lawyer For That Matter. Perhaps the wording is somewhat vague for Google’s or the Belgian legal system’s standard. I don’t know.)
Ah! I’m an idiot. The actual ruling of the appeal is the Enacting terms (Section V) as pointed out by the previous poster. I’m still not sure if Google is overreacting or not. Maybe they don’t know if the words “more specifically” narrow down the ruling to what comes after those words, or not:
“Orders Google to remove from Google.be and
Google.com sites, more specifically from the
“cached” links on “Google Web” and from the
“Google News” service…”
I guess we’ll find out.
One question to other posters (’cause I have no idea): if the judge thinks that the ruling didn’t include web search, that the language was clear, and that this is a retaliation, could Google be found in contempt of court? Or is it within Google’s right to not do business with people who gave them trouble?
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