Search Engines and Your Right to Privacy - The Limited Intelligence of Search
(Page 5 of 5 )
Everything mentioned so far does not count doctors, lawyers, and other professionals and businesses that have home pages with their addresses or phone numbers written on them in order to drum up business and make them easy to contact. In some cases, it’s obvious as to if the address was deliberately exposed, but there are times when a human operator may have to make a judgment call. If the operator made the wrong decision, Google is looking at another lawsuit.
Or, what would a filtering process do if there was an incorrectly written robots.txt but the page said “Come visit us at our office at 123 Drive Way in San Francisco”?
When it comes to indexing, it really is all or nothing.
CNET, proving that you can “find” all kinds of information about someone, is just a side effect of what Google wants to be: the best search engine on the planet. Of course, we have to worry about what the pages we look at actually have to say, especially since relevance is not necessarily accuracy,. As with all things, context is important. It is hard to say if Google is interested in managing that context, but I’m sure someone at the Google offices is looking at it.
It’s a tragedy that we have to worry about this. Hopefully, there will be a solution which doesn’t involve trampling on free speech or killing search engines with liability insurance. Technological solutions to sociological problems usually don’t work easily.
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
