Google Cache Makes Murdoch's K-12 Site Look Obscene 101
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."
This is why you robots.txt after a purchase (Score:5, Informative)
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:"Cache-land" (Score:5, Informative)
It's basically equivalent to quoting a portion of a work for a book review, which is fair use. Google's profitability is irrelevant.
People should be thankful for having an opt-out robots.txt at all. It would in most cases not violate copyright for Google to ignore it completely (it might violate the site's TOS, but it is questionable whether even this holds any weight); they are just courteous enough to honor it. robots.txt is there mostly to prevent servers from being overloaded, or to keep content private, not to enforce copyright on publicly-facing content.
No one cares what you "find weak" or "struggle understanding." I'm sure there's quite a bit.