Re: OT: Archives nearly useless? (Google doing evil?)
On 7/19/05, Marty <martyb@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> After recently purging most of my backuppc archives on the assumption
> that it would all be available on the internet, I tried to find this
> old thread, only to discover that sourceforge apparently does not
> allow searching on message contents, and google no longer seems to
> store any messages from any technical mailing lists!
You can hardly blame google for sourceforge's robots.txt. I think
it's *stupid* for sourceforge to prevent search engines from indexing
its mailing lists or forums, but people are still free to be stupid.
> As an experiment I then tried searching for messages from other list
> archives on google, and sure enough, none are archived there any longer.
> One of the lists, debian-user, is archived by means of being gatewayed
> to a newsgroup, so it's possible to find old threads that way, but it's
> disturbing to think that google now seems to have a monopoly on newsgroup
> archives too.
I can find debian-user postings on google pretty easily by specifying
"site:lists.debian.org" in my search. Trying a couple of keywords
that I'd seen recently picked up a posting from last week.
> This is troubling not only because I rely on message lists for much
> of my trouble-shooting information, but also because I had always had
> thought of my own contributions to such lists as free offerings for
> the public good, and not as a potential means of profiteering by
> archivists and search engine firms. The broader implications are
> scary to me, and I have to wonder if it's connected with the recent
> appearance of sites on which technical list questions, but not the
> answers, appear in search hits, and you only get to see the answers if
> you register (and presumably pay for the service as some future date).
> To me that would qualify as google doing "evil."
Again, you can't blame google for what other sites are or might
eventually be doing. Incidentally, if you find a site that's charging
for your public posts answering a query, you've probably got a decent
copyright violation case. IA, however, NAL.
> Maybe the most optimistic explanation would be just that google is
> knucking under to the rampant copyright or lawsuit madness that's
> plaguing the USA, but that still leaves a problem for technical
> list users.
I'd say the most optimistic explanation is that google is finding what
it's able to find while respecting site owners' wishes.
--
Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh
http://mamarsh.blogspot.com
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