Google Gone Loco

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In what can only be described as bizzare, after getting caught cloaking, and then getting slashdotted on it, GoogleGuy emerged in the safe haven of webmasterworld and had this to say:

Hey everyone, I’m sorry that it took me a while to post about this. I wanted to make sure I completely understood what was going on first.

Those pages were primarily intended for the Google Search Appliances that do site search on individual help center pages. For example, http://adwords.google.com/support has a search box, and that search is powered by a Google Search Appliance. In order to help the Google Search Appliance find answers to questions, the user support system checked for the user agent of “Googlebot” (the Google Search Appliance uses “Googlebot” as a user agent), and if it found it, it added additional information from the user support database into the title.

The issue is that in addition to being accessed via the internal site-search at each help center, these pages can be accessed by static links via the web. When the web-crawl Googlebot visits, the user support system thinks that it’s the Google Search Appliance (the code only checks for “Googlebot”) and adds these additional keywords.

That’s the background, so let me talk about what we’re doing. To be consistent with our guidelines, we’re removing these pages from our index. I think the pages are already gone from most of our data centers–a search like [site:google.com/support] didn’t return any of these pages when I checked. Once the pages are fully changed, people will have to follow the same procedure that anyone else would (email webmaster at google.com with the subject “Reinclusion request” to explain the situation).

So Google went ahead in banned itself. While you might think there’s something in the water over at the googleplex, I think it’s more of a Jedi mind trick to fool the weak minded.

Demonstrating a clear misunderstanding of the blogosphere and the power commands, Google is content with thier arrognace and refusal to address the more serious issues at hand. Well Danny Sullivan starts to call out Google and specifically Google guy on thier behavior:

By the way, GoogleGuy is indeed a real Google employee that you can trust as speaking for Google, even though as I’ve also written before, comments he makes have been sometimes said to be unofficial in nature.

Confusing? Yep, it is. I’ve also written before that it’s time for the lid to come off GoogleGuy’s identity. That’s especially so if Google’s going to continue releasing official information about controversial topics such as cloaking or nofollow via forums, blog entries and so on in this way. The company needs to finally identify the person behind the nickname, so that the general public doesn’t have to wonder if it’s really Google talking. I’ve had reporters ask me in the past how they can know the person is real; John Battelle on his blog wondered the same earlier this year after getting a GoogleGuy comment: …

Hopefully, we’ll see Google finally identify GoogleGuy so there’s no confusion that he does speak for the company. If not, and if we have to keep getting “official” information in this “non-official” way, I’ll simply out him myself.

Nick over at threadwatch is on fire about the whole thing (Google’s Communication Strategy - Wrong, wrong, wrong!) :

As i navigate around the blogosphere, and the Search forums i keep hearing the same thing: “Google is not part of the conversation”. This is true, in fact, they couldn’t be any more out of the conversation, and one has to wonder what the hell they think they’re doing?

Google are at the absolute bleeding edge of technology, but what about public relations, communication and participation? The Autolink debacle is a classic example, everybody is talking about it except Google and by not being part of the debate, and not being seen to participate and interact with their users, Google look more and more cold, and corporate everyday. They are being compared to Microsoft on a daily basis, yet as Doc Searles pointed out recently, even Microsoft eventually listened to thier customers and backed down from Smart Tags.

Don’t know how you feel, but Google if you don’t get your act together pretty soon and start talking to people I think it’s going to be too late. I wouldn’t go near that stock with a 10 foot pole right about now. Menawhile I’ll go get a bucket of popcorn and sit next to Bill Gates on the couch this is getting interesting …

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