1010 K Fri 3 May 2002
Google.com have lost me. When I search romanrite.com there or using the link at romanrite.com/search I am getting the message:
No pages were found containing "site:romanrite.com".
In the past they had romanrite.com cached. But they all seem to have disappeared.
Its a disaster for me, in terms of the objective of educating people about Catholic ceremonies, instituted lectors, and the Roman Missal. Before anyone could go to google.com or Yahoo and search for "new Roman Missal" and find my site. Today they will not.
Why has it happened? I don't know. I have not received an email or anything from them suggesting any problems. I think about the possibilities: a technology problem or an people problem?
Technology problem possibilities: a hard disk crashed, a cable disconnected, a virus attacked them or a facility was burnt down.
People problem possibilities: people complained so someone decided to remove romanrite.com. When you do a search at google if gives sites and has at the bottom:
Dissatisfied with your results? Help us improve.
There people can give feedback, that the results were offensive, poorly described, off topic etc. They also have section:
The page I was looking for wasn't listed in the results.
Yesterday I ticked this box a few times to try and give them the message that they had lost romanrite.com.
Perhaps it is some sort of combination of people and technology. To try and improve their service they may have tried to use there available storage space better and remove irrelevant pages. Somehow romanrite.com may have been lost this way.
Yesterday in The Age newspaper there was a story on search engines. It wrote about a rival to Google: WiseNut. Here was part of the article:
... "There is a whole cottage industry of people who try to set up fake Web pages to point to particular documents," says Evan Thornley, chief executive of LookSmart, the Web-directory company that bought WiseNut last month. ...
WiseNut avoids this, Thornley says, by looking more closely than Google does at the content of the page. ...
Perhaps Google tried to stop this problem and over corrected, losing my pages in the process. Perhaps there was a budget cut and they ran out of storage space for me.
On TV last night I watched a program "True Stories: Hacktivists" about people wrecking sites as a protest. So perhaps I am more inclined to conspiracy theories about what people are doing, rather than a technology problem.
Two cartoons in The Age newspaper lead me further in this direction. On the front page Tandberg has a very good one. Public servants are talking to a Navy officer, asking him "How would you feel about lying and deceiving the Australian public?" The Navy officer discreetly points to a cup of tea in front of him and replies "It's not my cup of tea". It has layers of meaning: I will not lie, but I may evade. But will I evade you or the Australian public?
Another is by Leunig on page 14:
They tapped his phone. They heard his conversation.(Picture of three men with headphones).
He was having one of those fantasy chats with an anonymous woman; Five dollars per minute.
"Patience, simplicity, compassion," she said to him, "these are the great treasures."
"Love your fellow creatures," she continued, "open your heart to nature's beautiful truth; honour it with courage wisdom and tenderness, and be of good cheer"
"Yes Yes YES!" he moaned blissfully as he heard the forbidden words.
They heard it all. They recorded everything. And now he was in BIG TROUBLE. (The three men now have horns, they are devils).
I my case Google seem to have stopped recording everything and have lost the records. I don't know why. Its a shame, because I have found it a very good search engine. Fortunately there are alternatives.
Copyright J.R. Lilburne, 3 May 2002.
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