Mastodawn

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116605858023186072

Google Search rests on a social contract: their bots can crawl our sites, they can index our sites, and they can show excerpts of our sites because

and •only because•

they send people to our sites. •Our• sites, our words, with our design, with our links, with our context and our aesthetics, shared the way we want to share them.

Google is announcing — unambiguously and with great fanfare — that they are now fully breaking that already-ragged contract. We should reciprocate.

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Paul Cantrell 1d ago

Quick strategy discussion, for those who understand Google indexing and SEO:

If I want to yank a web site out of Google’s now-fully-extractive search, should I (1) disallow googlebot in robots.txt or (2) add `<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">` to all the page headers?

The goal here is not just to remove my contributions to the commons from Google’s results, but to •make Google aware• that sites are pulling consent. What will best do that?

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Paul Cantrell 1d ago

Same question as the previous post, except for Wkipedia. What would you like to see them do to send a shot across the bow?

Or…well, it’s Wikipedia. Maybe more like a shot to the hull.

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Paul Cantrell 1d ago

Going with meta noindex for now. My thinking is that this actively tells Google to yank already-crawled content from their index, whereas they might take a robots.txt entry to mean “do not update, but keep showing last fetched.”

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Paul Cantrell 1d ago

OK, a •lot• of replies need this reponse:

Yes, of •course• they will start ignoring robots.txt etc as soon as they think it hurts their business. Of course.

It is important to •force that fight•, rather than just capitulating in advance.

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MaddieM4

@inthehands All this, and a little more! When Google *does* start ignoring robots.txt and other mechanisms, that's another victory for us, not them, even if it means we have to react to it.

Not all of Google's infrastructure is servers in a giant building, or software systems running on top of it, or even offices full of stressed out tech workers. Part of their infrastructure, the cladding on the castle walls, is their false pretense of being good citizens on the internet. When we call their bluff and they eventually drop the pretense, that's us getting them to tear down the outer layers of the castle themselves. We know what they are, and we can make them admit it, and that's power.