"Out of sight, out of mind" - translated into Russian and then back into English, the idiom turns into "invisible lunatics." That also describes The People's Cube's search results in Google.
(posted on Google.com Help Center at 8:30pm on March 10, 2006).
Dear comrades at Google:
At some point, quite recently, our popular site "The People's Cube" (ThePeoplesCube.com) was purged from Google search results. MSN, Yahoo, and other search engines still have it - but Google has erased/blocked any link to the site in its database. One can still find links to us from other sites - but not even one from Google to ThePeoplesCube.com.
We tried American, French, German, British, Australian, and Russian versions of Google - they used to give us traffic only a few days ago - but all we got was the same line in various languages: Sorry, no information is available for the URL thepeoplescube.com. And if we clicked on Find web pages from the site thepeoplescube.com we got Your search - site:thepeoplescube.com - did not match any documents.
The first time we saw this line it was written in Chinese. We used to look up The People's Cube for fun in the communist-censored Google China only weeks ago - and reported it on our site in a story called Google's Great Leap Forward. Of course our site was blocked by the Chinese government, with Google's consent, along with legions of other Western sites - but we couldn't imagine that only a few weeks later we would get the same results in English. The last time we checked we still lived in the United States - not China - but hey, whoever controls the information is the boss.
If it were a glitch in an algorithm it might throw our rankings back to the end of the line - but this is a total removal. We suspect it is also a deliberate removal - much in the spirit of 1984-style historical revisionism - removal of a "people's enemy" from life and history. Sergei Brin's Russian parents might tell him stories of people in Stalinist Russia disappearing, along with all their pictures and records. "Out of sight, out of mind" - translated into Russian and then back into English, the idiom turns into "invisible lunatics." That also describes The People's Cube's search results in Google.
We can only think of three reasons for this:
You tell me which one it is.
The People's Cube is a business corporation selling products on the Internet. A drop in traffic, caused by a malicious tempering with search results, has affected sales and that gives us grounds for you-know-what.
We'll start by posting this letter on our site and wait for your reply. We'll gladly drop the matter and similarly drop this post into the "memory hole" if we get a quick response from you and our high rankings in Google get immediately restored. An apology would be nice as well.
If you can, we'd appreciate if you pass the following word to our former compatriot Sergei Brin: "Seriozhka, konchai duraka valat' - bylo vremia kogda my toboi gordilis'!" (Sergie, stop making a fool out of yourself, we used to be proud of you!)
Keep the Cube rolling,
Comrade Red Square
Screenshots of search results in Google as of 03/08/06:
Google Home (USA):
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweilwer linked to this story, gave a boost in traffic.
Thanks, Emperor Misha! Google would've never given us the same viewership.
Little Green Footbals linked to the story, gave us even more traffic.
Michelle Malkin linked to the story, gave us even greater traffic than before!
Thanks, Michelle! We love you!
At about 5pm the Google people finally figured out their damage control strategy (apparently upon consulting the Chinese Politburo). A Google engineer Matt Cutts posted on his blog an article displaying previously existing on the Cube invisible keywords and links to a few of my other sites. The keywords were relevant and were placed there only because Google does not factor meta keywords while indexing the pages. The hidden links were so few, they were hardly worth mentioning - especially that about half of them are explicitly displayed on the Cube anyway (Che-Mart, FCBC, CFK, Borat, etc.) [UPDATE: stopborat.com has since become stopborat.net as the original domain was snatched by someone who wanted to capitalize on its residual traffic]
Bingo! That was Google's excuse for removing the Cube! What were the chances of that happening, out of a million sites that are forced to place invisible keywords to compensate for Google's deficiency? An email was sent to LGF and Malkin, demanding a retraction and siting Matt Cutts's blog - without mentioning his affiliation with Google - and that was how LGF posted it, and Malkin and others also easily gave in, accepting their story. It's now official: The People's Cube is a spammer!
Almost simultaneously, "concerned progressive trolls" unfolded a massive offensive on the Cube, flooding the thread with insults, gloating, and accusations most of which had been deleted - but some of them were kept for historical reference. Their major point was the "blatant malicious spamming with which I harmed the Internet and - oh no! - Google itself." From their tone one might think that I sided with a murderous dictatorship to make money on suppressing freedoms of a billion of people. Or was that Google that did that? It's unforgivable what the powerful overlord Red Square had done to a small, defenseless, and progressive search engine that could.
Apparently that is what Google calls customer service. They must have learned it in Beijing. There were seemingly unaffiliated volunteers as well. Let's just say that one of them started calling my web design customers (using the numbers he found on their websites) and telling them that due to their affiliation with the People's Cube their URLs would be removed from all search engines - unless they paid him $200 to prevent that. He also sent them emails. Here's one that my customer and friend forwarded to me:
After having done that, this concerned progressive citizen (who represents a Bush-bashing file-sharing website under the slogan "To promote freedom and fight fascism") returned to the Cube to insult me and gloat a bit more, stating that my behavior sickened him. I don't know what's scarier, the character of these "concerned citizens" or the fact that LGF, Malkin, and some others so easily accepted their line about Google being the good guy and I'm the evil, malicious spammer who deserves to have the People's Cube to be booted from the internet.
That's customer relations Google-style. They work, for now. I haven't received any response from Google in my mailbox yet.
Laika the Space Dog writes a song Google Über Alles - you can now sing along to the inspiring music of world domination here >> (turn on your speakers - all the way!)
Days after a few people had forwarded me Google's responses to their requests regarding The Cube, Google finally sent me a measured response that reads as if it was written by a lawyer: "While we cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed, we'd like to assure you that we do not alter our search results based on political viewpoint or ideology." But "the individual reasons" is the key to understanding the whole removal business. The devil is in the details, comrades!
Google restores The Cube in its index, as quietly as it had removed it. The page rank is not what it used to be, but if natural algorithms are allowed to run their course The Cube will be up at the top of search results as before.
We have also learned that "Google Inc.'s mysterious methods for ranking Web sites came under attack Friday in a lawsuit accusing the online search engine leader of ruining scores of Internet businesses that have been wrongfully banished from its index."
Web site sues over Google 'blacklist'
Web Site Files Complaint Against Google
Ironically, government interference in running private businesses is the extension of "progressive" policies that Google's creators and their advisor Al Gore are currently promoting. If the lawsuit results in the government forcing Google to change the way it runs business, I hope the taste of their own medicine will bring Brin and Page to their senses and they'll think a little harder about what's progressive and what's not.
Open letter #2 to Google from the People's Cube
(posted on Google.com Help Center at 8:30pm on March 10, 2006).
Dear comrades at Google:
At some point, quite recently, our popular site "The People's Cube" (ThePeoplesCube.com) was purged from Google search results. MSN, Yahoo, and other search engines still have it - but Google has erased/blocked any link to the site in its database. One can still find links to us from other sites - but not even one from Google to ThePeoplesCube.com.
We tried American, French, German, British, Australian, and Russian versions of Google - they used to give us traffic only a few days ago - but all we got was the same line in various languages: Sorry, no information is available for the URL thepeoplescube.com. And if we clicked on Find web pages from the site thepeoplescube.com we got Your search - site:thepeoplescube.com - did not match any documents.
The first time we saw this line it was written in Chinese. We used to look up The People's Cube for fun in the communist-censored Google China only weeks ago - and reported it on our site in a story called Google's Great Leap Forward. Of course our site was blocked by the Chinese government, with Google's consent, along with legions of other Western sites - but we couldn't imagine that only a few weeks later we would get the same results in English. The last time we checked we still lived in the United States - not China - but hey, whoever controls the information is the boss.
If it were a glitch in an algorithm it might throw our rankings back to the end of the line - but this is a total removal. We suspect it is also a deliberate removal - much in the spirit of 1984-style historical revisionism - removal of a "people's enemy" from life and history. Sergei Brin's Russian parents might tell him stories of people in Stalinist Russia disappearing, along with all their pictures and records. "Out of sight, out of mind" - translated into Russian and then back into English, the idiom turns into "invisible lunatics." That also describes The People's Cube's search results in Google.
We can only think of three reasons for this:
- Google is retaliating against sites that ridiculed its Google China project.
- Google has begun to implement its Google China policies in the rest of the free world.
- A left-leaning Google employee who's got access to the database was suffering a nervous breakdown over the mockery of Marxism on our site, and so he or she dastardly removed/blocked The People's Cube, hoping to "improve" the public discourse by silencing the competition.
You tell me which one it is.
The People's Cube is a business corporation selling products on the Internet. A drop in traffic, caused by a malicious tempering with search results, has affected sales and that gives us grounds for you-know-what.
We'll start by posting this letter on our site and wait for your reply. We'll gladly drop the matter and similarly drop this post into the "memory hole" if we get a quick response from you and our high rankings in Google get immediately restored. An apology would be nice as well.
If you can, we'd appreciate if you pass the following word to our former compatriot Sergei Brin: "Seriozhka, konchai duraka valat' - bylo vremia kogda my toboi gordilis'!" (Sergie, stop making a fool out of yourself, we used to be proud of you!)
Keep the Cube rolling,
Comrade Red Square
APPENDIX I
Screenshots of search results in Google as of 03/08/06:
Google Home (USA):
- Google Deutschland (Germany)
- Google France
- Google Australia
- Google Russia (Motherland)
- And Google China (of course)
Update #1
March 12, 2006 - 2:17 pmAnti-Idiotarian Rottweilwer linked to this story, gave a boost in traffic.
Google Purges
Not that it ought to come as a surprise to anyone. Google is the same company, after all, that decided to roll over for the Butchers in Beijing and help the communist clownshoes oppress their people by filtering the ChiCom version of Google to eradicate criticism of the regime, all for an undisclosed number of silver pieces. But now they've taken it one step further and are purging sites from their database that mock leftism, not just in China but all over the world.The People's Cube is the target right now, but one can only wonder when the Stalinist Sycophants start broadening the scope of their censorship.
Thanks, Emperor Misha! Google would've never given us the same viewership.
Update #2
March 12, 2006 - 7pmLittle Green Footbals linked to the story, gave us even more traffic.
Google Purges People's Cube
Has Google purged Marxist parody site The People's Cube from its search index? It certainly looks like it, while jihad sites openly advocating for Al Qaeda continue to be included, both in Google's search index and as legitimate news at Google News.
Update #3
March 13, 2006 - 12:30 pmAn overwhelming response to this story on the Web has prompted me to post this update:
I sent a letter to the few Google addresses I could find, but there was no reply. From my prior experience I know they wouldn't answer. If I were a "progressive, open-minded, scientifically-oriented" liberal, I'd immediately suspect an evil corporate conspiracy. But because I choose to live by reason, I tried to consider various technical and logical explanations for this. None seemed to work.
If these technical details are boring, please skip to the next paragraph. A glitch in an algorithm would throw the links back in ranking from #1 to #1000 - but this wais a total, absolute removal - including the cache. If I were to remove a page from the site it would still show up in Google for a few days or even weeks and I'd be able at least to view its cached image. The links and the page ranking would cease gradually over a few days, not abruptly and not simultaneously, world-wide. If some code change on my site would stop crawlers from visiting it, it would have similarly affected all other search engines, not just Google - which it didn't. And it would also be a gradual process - which it wasn't.
I know that in the past Google had quietly removed my friend's excellent satirical page from its database on request of "peace" activists who had been featured in it. The page was dealing with the lunacy of nude peace protests started by a Californian artist Donna Sheehan (relation to Cindy Sheehan is yet to be researched). It was a selected removal - one page out of many on the site - at the time when that particular page was beginning to get over a 1000 visitors a day due to its topical content. My friend complained to Google but never got a response. Later the page was restored in Google, but the timing was lost and the traffic never recovered. The page was killed - quietly and anonymously - by someone's invisible hand at Google. The suppression was discovered only because my friend had enough time on his hands to check live page statistics every hour. Who knows what and how many pages Google had deliberately killed without anyone noticing it?
About a year later Google stood on principle defending their refusal to remove Jew Watch from #1 position in their results for "Jew. " Maybe they were right to do that - but I wasn't impressed, knowing their sneaky practices in removing "incorrect" links in the past.
There are many indications that Google is a left-leaning group of people, including their cooperation with Chinese communists in filtering "incorrect" sites, their choice of Al Gore as Chief Advisor in 2001, and even the laughable title "You can make money without doing evil" on their official corporate page named "Our Philosophy" (implying that money is mostly made by doing evil, at least in this country).
Google will likely stonewall any inquiry into this, so it would be hard to know if that had been an official decision to "improve" public discourse by silencing the competition - or some left-leaning Google employee had simply volunteered to kill the site upon suffering a nervous breakdown over our mockery of Marxism.
Why the People's Cube? We weren't the only ones who mocked their Google China project. Google probably won't bother to pick on small blogs, and they won't dare touch well-visited anti-left sites like Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, or Little Green Footballs - but a relatively new, medium-sized Cube is a convenient target. I can also tell from my personal experience that our satire disturbs the "open-minded" lefties on a much deeper level than a straightforward criticism of their ideology, and it causes a more violent reaction.
Another logical argument in favor of my theory is that it's hard to imagine a similar sabotage by Google happening to "progressive" web pages that compare Bush to Hitler, gloat over the loss of American life, or call to screw the Constitution and the people. Even if requests to suppress these pages existed, they'd be indignantly refuted by Google as attacks on free speech, with a subsequent PR campaign in the liberal media.
Google's seemingly goofy slogan "Don't do evil" sounds like a sinister warning once you discover that the evildoer is, in fact, you. Your work, the product of your mind constitute evil - and Google is morally obligated to stop you: Don't do evil - or else! It's noteworthy that the liberal media likes to badger "evil corporations" and expose warning signs of fascism, with their vigilant eye permanently fixed on the political Right. They either never look to the Left for the signs of danger, or they welcome it as a positive development.
-- Red Square
Update #4
March 13, 2006 - 12:30 pmMichelle Malkin linked to the story, gave us even greater traffic than before!
A GOOGLE PURGE?
What happened to The People's Cube?
Maybe Al Gore's people at Google Current TV can find out for us and report back.
Thanks, Michelle! We love you!
Update #5
March 13, 2006 - midnightAt about 5pm the Google people finally figured out their damage control strategy (apparently upon consulting the Chinese Politburo). A Google engineer Matt Cutts posted on his blog an article displaying previously existing on the Cube invisible keywords and links to a few of my other sites. The keywords were relevant and were placed there only because Google does not factor meta keywords while indexing the pages. The hidden links were so few, they were hardly worth mentioning - especially that about half of them are explicitly displayed on the Cube anyway (Che-Mart, FCBC, CFK, Borat, etc.) [UPDATE: stopborat.com has since become stopborat.net as the original domain was snatched by someone who wanted to capitalize on its residual traffic]
Bingo! That was Google's excuse for removing the Cube! What were the chances of that happening, out of a million sites that are forced to place invisible keywords to compensate for Google's deficiency? An email was sent to LGF and Malkin, demanding a retraction and siting Matt Cutts's blog - without mentioning his affiliation with Google - and that was how LGF posted it, and Malkin and others also easily gave in, accepting their story. It's now official: The People's Cube is a spammer!
Almost simultaneously, "concerned progressive trolls" unfolded a massive offensive on the Cube, flooding the thread with insults, gloating, and accusations most of which had been deleted - but some of them were kept for historical reference. Their major point was the "blatant malicious spamming with which I harmed the Internet and - oh no! - Google itself." From their tone one might think that I sided with a murderous dictatorship to make money on suppressing freedoms of a billion of people. Or was that Google that did that? It's unforgivable what the powerful overlord Red Square had done to a small, defenseless, and progressive search engine that could.
Apparently that is what Google calls customer service. They must have learned it in Beijing. There were seemingly unaffiliated volunteers as well. Let's just say that one of them started calling my web design customers (using the numbers he found on their websites) and telling them that due to their affiliation with the People's Cube their URLs would be removed from all search engines - unless they paid him $200 to prevent that. He also sent them emails. Here's one that my customer and friend forwarded to me:
From: [email protected]
To: [removed]
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 18:36:05 -0600
Subject: URGENT: Site about to be delisted from Search Engines!
Hello.
Your site is associated with peoplescube.com in a way that *will* get it banned, possibly as soon as tomorrow, from Google, Yahoo, and MSN search engines if immediate action is not taken to correct the illegal way in which your site was designed. I can do this for the nominal fee of $200 but you must contact me immediately!
Email or call me (832-814-9118), and visit mattcutts.com/blog for more information on the peoplescube.com blacklisting.
Theodore R. Smith
TSoft Solutions
After having done that, this concerned progressive citizen (who represents a Bush-bashing file-sharing website under the slogan "To promote freedom and fight fascism") returned to the Cube to insult me and gloat a bit more, stating that my behavior sickened him. I don't know what's scarier, the character of these "concerned citizens" or the fact that LGF, Malkin, and some others so easily accepted their line about Google being the good guy and I'm the evil, malicious spammer who deserves to have the People's Cube to be booted from the internet.
That's customer relations Google-style. They work, for now. I haven't received any response from Google in my mailbox yet.
Update #6
March 14, 2006 - 3:00pmLaika the Space Dog writes a song Google Über Alles - you can now sing along to the inspiring music of world domination here >> (turn on your speakers - all the way!)
Update #7
March 14, 2006 9:pmDays after a few people had forwarded me Google's responses to their requests regarding The Cube, Google finally sent me a measured response that reads as if it was written by a lawyer: "While we cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed, we'd like to assure you that we do not alter our search results based on political viewpoint or ideology." But "the individual reasons" is the key to understanding the whole removal business. The devil is in the details, comrades!
Update #8
March 17, 2006Google restores The Cube in its index, as quietly as it had removed it. The page rank is not what it used to be, but if natural algorithms are allowed to run their course The Cube will be up at the top of search results as before.
We have also learned that "Google Inc.'s mysterious methods for ranking Web sites came under attack Friday in a lawsuit accusing the online search engine leader of ruining scores of Internet businesses that have been wrongfully banished from its index."
Web site sues over Google 'blacklist'
Web Site Files Complaint Against Google
Ironically, government interference in running private businesses is the extension of "progressive" policies that Google's creators and their advisor Al Gore are currently promoting. If the lawsuit results in the government forcing Google to change the way it runs business, I hope the taste of their own medicine will bring Brin and Page to their senses and they'll think a little harder about what's progressive and what's not.