Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 309 posts

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#261

Post by gambiting »

akiselev wrote: post #116
gambiting wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean electrician's insurance? I do have a so called "DIY insurance" on my home policy - if I damage something while doing a DIY project(drill into a cable or a pipe for instance) my home insurance will cover the repair. Is that not enough?

No, that's just for incidental damage and probably legally mandated by your state. If your house burns down to due to DIY wiring, the insurance company won't pay out a dime (if the inspectors discover it). Electricians have liability insurance provided by an organization specializing in policies for practicing tradesmen. If an insurance company fails to disqualify a homeowner's policy and pays out, it will then go af…

Hmmmm I'm not so sure. I'm in the UK not in the states, so the laws are different I'm sure, but in UK you only need a licenced electrician when adding/removing an electrical circuit and for any electrical work in the bathrooms. So say adding a new spur from your fuse box to add electricity to your garage or a garden shed - that sort of thing. Any work on existing circuits(adding sockets, light switches, new light mounts etc) is fair play and doesn't require a permission or any paperwork. Instead you just get an electrical inspection done and an electrician signs off on the house as a whole.

Like someone else said - when you buy a house you don't know how the electrical wiring was done and by whom. Paperwork is required only for the things I mentioned above - new circuits added after the house was built mostly. And even then someone would need to prove that it was done after construction.

So even if the insurance company wanted to deny a claim due to a DIY fitted socket....I think they would struggle, as there's absolutely nothing forbidding me from installing one, and most importantly - my contract with the insurance company doesn't forbid me from doing so.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#262

Post by ricardo81 »

It really wouldn't be so much of a problem if Google didn't command 90%+ market share in many countries.

Anecdotally I remember a fine example from a few years ago when Matt Cutts proclaimed they had algorithmically solved spam for queries such as payday loans. A day later, one appeared with Mr Cutts selling payday loans. It was removed within 24 hours.

[0] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940....

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#263

Post by jpadkins »

teddyh wrote: post #260
Ntrails wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People often pay electricians even for tasks that are just "flip a switch and turn some screws," after all. My Grandfather used to tell a story about an old aeroplane that wouldn't start. They found a retired engineer who agreed to come out and look. Did so, had a listen when they tried, And nodded to himself. From his toolbox he removed a hammer and smacked the engine once sharply. Suddenly it started right up. Ma…

That is an urban legend, at least 100 years old: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/

Did you really need snopes to know that was a fable? Was it not obvious from the story itself?

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#264

Post by dorgo »

lostmsu wrote: post #79
dkokelley wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thought experiment: What would happen if someone encoded something horrible and illegal like child porn into a blockchain? Is everyone who operates on that chain guilty of possession? Does that make a specific crypto "illegal" if its blockchain contains illegal content?

If you extend it wide enough, one should ban natural numbers because some of them in binary form are identical to child pornography video files.

And don't forget random number generators. They are just evil sometimes.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#265

Post by sumedh »

sombremesa wrote: post #173
amelius wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ending up in a Google search result can too, I suppose, in some indirect way.

Help me with how this is relevant. Is the person you hired to scrub your Google result risking getting doxxed?

I assume the point was that anything negative about you ends up on Google it can lead to mental issues and in a worst case scenario you might take your life so its better you hire a professional to scrub it for you.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#266

Post by forgotpwd16 »

danso wrote: post #14
f38zf5vdt wrote: post #3

...what? I've known of this for at least a decade. Do people expect Google to be some free-for-all of unmoderated knowledge that can be used to defame and degrade others?

The author of the tweet also wrote a major NYT story about the topic earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25972121 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/technology/change-my-goog... The story focuses on a software engineer who discovered that he was the slander target of someone who had been fired by his father 30 years ago. He found her identity and took her to court in 2018. But the libelous Google…

>Until recently, Google would remove a website from your results only if it could cause financial damage, such as by exposing your Social Security number. Now Google will remove other harmful content, including revenge porn and private medical information.

No wonder few people know it. On the "until recently" checking the Internet Archive[0], removal of any personal information was introduced to their page at end of 2019. Before then the only way was removing the information from the sites to which the result link pointed.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20191229062036/https://support.g...

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#267

Post by ntauthority »

dorgo wrote: post #264
lostmsu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you extend it wide enough, one should ban natural numbers because some of them in binary form are identical to child pornography video files.

And don't forget random number generators. They are just evil sometimes.

It is amazing that the output of a random number generator can be considered a core part of a DMCA-style 'illegal to work around' anti-circumvention solution.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#268

Post by crispyambulance »

gist wrote: post #76
danso wrote: post #2

Couldn't fit the whole tweet, so just to be clear, she's talking about manual, non-legal requests: > One of the surprising things about working on the slander series is how few people in the field, even experts, know that Google voluntarily removes some search results. (No court order needed!) You have to visit this generic url: https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?... Down the thread, she adds…

> are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack. 'ALL THEY DO' is what anyone does in a similar way. You are paying for what they know that you don't know how to do. There is nothing wrong or deceptive about making money in this way. (use of 'all they…

> There is nothing wrong or deceptive about making money in this way.

Absolutely incorrect. It's more complicated and insidious than your reductive argument suggests.

These reputation "management" companies are also the ones who scrape public records on a massive scale and DELIBERATELY place this data really high up in search rankings. So, casual searches for someone's name often end up returning vague negative results like "xxx has a criminal record, find out more!". They ALSO spam people at internet scale and warn them about their "reputation" and how they can "fix" it.

In other words, they provide the "cure" for the "injury" which they've caused.

One of the worst and biggest of these piece of sh*t companies is mylife.com. They do the web-scraping and the SEO to get their results up high, AND ALSO charge money to "clean up" reputations. It happens to be legal in the USA because we're in a downward spiral of techno-feudalism, but it's a vile and dishonorable practice.

The founder of mylife.com, Jeffery Tinsely, has become wealthy from these deceptive practices. He faces regular lawsuits (eg https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2020/website-sue...). But somehow mylife.com continues to survive presumably by raking in the cash as well as VC investment (not sure if it was mylife or one of the other slimy companies run by Tinsely).

FWIW, it is possible to remove your results from mylife.com. I did it. It requires a phone call and some firm persistence and patience. You call them on the phone and talk to someone at an Indian call center. Just say that you want to remove your name from mylife.com searches. It costs nothing but they WILL try to sell you their junk reputation management service with boiler-room-like intensity (worse than Verizon or Comcast), just decline for the 2 dozen times they ask. In the end it worked, I am no longer searchable on mylife.com and no mylife.com results show up on google under my name, but I get several emails a day from these MF's telling me that my reputation needs fixing and that "other people can see it".

There's other companies like this. Mylife is particularly slimy but it's the biggest.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#269

Post by pessimizer »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #244
propogandist wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

laws requiring a third party to sign off on things you can do to your own property sounds like a violation of freedoms

The prior owner of my house was very free with his exposed wire nuts and other sketchy wiring practices then. I’ll take some level of safety that my house won’t burn down or electrocute me over absolute freedom.

You should have a house inspected before you buy it. It's not necessary to monitor and restrict all owners to protect possible future buyers who don't want to inspect a house before buying it.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#270

Post by [deleted] »

franga2000 wrote: post #250
rob74 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do anything you want on your own property, but if said property burns down because of incorrect electrical work you did yourself, you might not get money from your insurance...

Where is this notion of "you can do anything on your property" coming from? A similar one is also "it's my car, I'll do what I want with it", etc. But all modification to both your house anr your car have a big possibility of puttinf others in danger. If you mod your car in a dangerous way or screw up your house electrical wiring, other unrelated people may get hurt - you don't have the right to do that!

[deleted]
Post reply on HN