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Google Education The Internet

Google Cache Makes Murdoch's K-12 Site Look Obscene 101

Posted by timothy from the you-aren't-allowed-to-have-said-that dept.
theodp writes "Rupert Murdoch's Amplify Education site is all about the kids, so it's understandable that the site's Terms of Use bans abusive, pornographic, obscene, and vulgar content. But if one uses Google to do a site search of Amplify.com (e.g., site:amplify.com donkey) you may get quite an unexpected eye-opener (redacted, but still NSFW). So, does someone at Amplify really want to "@&^$" your "a**"? Of course not. But this does serve as a cautionary tale of the perils of buying a second-hand domain name when pages of the shuttered site may live on in cache-land. Prior to its conversion to a site for kids' education, Amplify.com was a social sharing product that allowed users to clip favorite sites from the web and add their own commentary. Google does note that removed content may still show up in Google's search results in certain situations (removal requests can be made)." Update: 04/08 17:04 GMT by T : Stephanie Chang writes (in a comment below): "Hi, I’m the editor of Amplify.com. We purchased our domain name in February 2012 and took ownership of the site in July 2012 for use as our company's home page. Prior to that, the domain was used by its previous owners as a social-sharing site. As a result, some old content dating back to the previous domain ownership still shows up as cached on certain search engines. Amplify Education, Inc. did not produce the cached content in question nor do we in any way endorse it. We’re working with Google and other search providers to make sure caches of our site are up to date. In the meantime, we apologize to anyone whose attempts to locate information on amplifying donkeys resulted in a negative browsing experience."
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Google Cache Makes Murdoch's K-12 Site Look Obscene More

Google Cache Makes Murdoch's K-12 Site Look Obscene

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  • Other good porn sites? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Thanks! I'm looking for suggestions for other good porn sites - preferably free, although I'm not opposed to paying a little if the content is particularly high quality. Good job /.!

  • This is why you robots.txt after a purchase (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07, 2013 @12:40PM (#43384897)

    If you want to establish your own site after you take it over, always throw a deny-all robots.txt to clear out it's google cache and archive.org entries for a couple of weeks

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by c ( 8461 )

      We're talking about Rupert Murdoch; it's a pretty solid bet that robots.txt won't be part of his solution.

    • Uhm... I think it's better to 410 (Gone) the offending URLs. Or better, if possible, redirect them to similar on-site content.
    • This is a traditional dead tree publisher its like training cats to push jelly uphill to get things done properly at this sort of organization.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If that actually works, that's really scary. That would mean that the Internet Archive's copy a whole website could be removed entirely just because the domain name changed ownership. There are quite a few scenario's where this is clearly unwanted, the most obvious ones being the operator of the site running out of cash and selling it, or a site a site that contains dirt on e.g. the political process that gets confiscated or pressured into removing the pages.

    • If you add a deny all robots.txt, the domain will be permanently excluded from the archive.org wayback machine, regardless of if you change it to allow later.

      Currently there is no way to exclude only a portion of a site, or to exclude archiving a site for a particular time period only.
      When a URL has been excluded at direct owner request from being archived, that exclusion is retroactive and permanent.

      http://archive.org/about/faqs.php#14 [archive.org]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

        That's probably exactly what he wants. No point letting others keep records of past bad behaviour or fickle political support that is revoked as soon as the other party gets its tongue a bit further up his arse.

  • Rupert Murdoch doesn't want to f_ck your a_s - he wants to f_ck your access to impartial press.

  • And Google Street View makes me look bad... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by truedfx ( 802492 ) on Sunday April 07, 2013 @12:54PM (#43384993)
    ...if the previous residents of my house liked to decorate the windows with pentagrams? Or do people understand that different people live at the same address at different times?

    • Re:And Google Street View makes me look bad... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mounthood ( 993037 ) on Sunday April 07, 2013 @01:17PM (#43385105)

      ...if the previous residents of my house liked to decorate the windows with pentagrams? Or do people understand that different people live at the same address at different times?

      No, not when it comes to the internet. If hotmail.com was sold and became a p0rn site, it'd be a media apocalypse. Eventually people would understand the difference but they don't today.

      What should be done, relative to the popular ignorance on this subject, is simple: the buyers of used domains should be careful to guard their reputations, allowing caches to expire, 404'ing inbound links from old affiliates, etc... A more interesting discussion would be, What technical steps should be taken when buying a used domain?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by truedfx ( 802492 )

        If hotmail.com was sold and became a p0rn site

        If I move and don't tell anyone, people who are looking for me will continue to ring the doorbell at my old address. If I want people to be able to find me, I should let them know I am going to move. But that's not the same thing. This isn't about what will be happening on the old address, but about what has already happened on the new address.

  • What is the point of replacing 'fucking' by 'f****ng', 'ass' by 'a**' and 'dick' by 'd**k'? In the context you can still clearly tell what the words being used are.

    • What's the point of complaining about the redacting? In the context you can still clearly tell what the words being used are --- unless you're that one guy who can't, who now has an intriguing motivation to learn a few more vocabulary words today.

      • What worries me is this crazy american political correctness.
        Think of the children! We mustn't say bad words! Instead we'll say them, but with a letter missing.
        This is the stupidest thing ever devised.

        • A knee-jerk over-reaction to perceived "political correctness" is itself somewhat worrying.
          Thing to worry about: school library removes books discussing human sexuality and reproductive health.
          Thing not to worry about: a child is potentially denied the chance to see "donkey dick fucking your ass" spelled out un-redacted on a news site.
          I don't think it's unreasonable for a website to respect the squeamishness of potential readers (even if they are irrational for caring about word usage), so long as this does

          • You do realize that doing this took time and energy, both of which are valuable and were wasted. Just like you're wasting my time now.

            • You waste your own time by reading/responding; don't blame others for your failings.

              I suppose I mistakenly assumed that you were against censorship for any sort of free speech concern. Given that you want to micro-manage how others spend their own time and choose to communicate, you can't be much of an advocate for freedom. What a pity, if only Slashdot posters didn't waste all their f**king time censoring swears, they'd surely use that saved time to cure cancer! If we made 'loufoque' dictator of the univer

              • What I'm against is doing things that are clearly useless and that fail on everything they were trying to achieve.

                • How do you know the redaction failed "everything they were trying to achieve"? If the goal of the redaction was to prevent people from being able to figure out what the words were, it obviously failed; but that (based on the obvious failure) probably wasn't the redactor's goal. If the goal was to replace some occurrences of the letters "uc", "ic", and "as" with "**" (or a gray box, in the image), it was a complete success. If the goal was to avoid offending people who, for their own idiosyncratic and possib

    • What is the point of replacing 'fucking' by 'f****ng', 'ass' by 'a**' and 'dick' by 'd**k'? In the context you can still clearly tell what the words being used are.

      Deamons (automatic programs) that trigger on the exact spelling, doing something to (needlessly?) block it.

  • WebArchive could be a even serious problem here.

    Google's cache are temporary. WebArchive aims to be eternal. :-)

  • You spell "a***", not "a**". For f***'s sake, learn English!
  • Hi, I’m the editor of Amplify.com. We purchased our domain name in February 2012 and took ownership of the site in July 2012 for use as our company's home page. Prior to that, the domain was used by its previous owners as a social-sharing site. As a result, some old content dating back to the previous domain ownership still shows up as cached on certain search engines. Amplify Education, Inc. did not produce the cached content in question nor do we in any way endorse it. We’re working with Goog

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