November 6, 2003
The Google Blues
This is what I really wanted to talk about tonight, before I got all caught up in the red glare of tail lights and matronly admonishments for being tardy.
Today, this dude (we'll call him Moderately Famous Dude) wrote to me at work and asked that we expunge all mention of his name from the online version of our publication. Apparently, when people do Google searches for Moderately Famous Dude's name, they come up with two articles we published about him as the first and second links. The articles are no longer factually accurate because his circumstances have changed since they were printed in the paper magazine, but they were correct at the time and they live in our archive. Moderately Famous Dude wants them wiped.
This is one of those times where print and online reveal their divergent natures. Once the print issue is out, there's no going back. We can offer corrections and retractions, but we can't enter the offices of 150,000 subscribers and physically remove the article from their posession. Online, we have the convenience of instant and ubiquitous changes. We can yank the page and it if no one has archived it, it disappears forever. Moderately Famous Dude knows the nature of the online beast and he's requesting we do exactly that. In my opinion, that takes advantage of the impermanence of Web pages at the expense of our publication's consistency.
The online site is supposed to mirror the print publication. Who wants to see a swiss cheese version? Who wants to run an online publication where every Moderately Famous Dude has the power to rip out huge chunks of our content based on whim? Moderately Famous Dude can't stop people from going to a library microfiche archive (do they still use those?) and finding his articles, so why should he be granted the luxury of removing them online?
I haven't checked work email, so I don't know what our policy is (or response will be), but I hope that we're going to keep the archive as is. Then again, as the lucky person who will answer his email, maybe I should be hoping the other way around.
Comments
I can't say that I love the of someone having veto power over previously published content.
Removing the physical page(s) won't solve the Google cache issue anyway. Cache can be disabled, but it has to be requested by the owner of the domain on which the pages are hosted -- i.e., your company.
Historical articles are just that. If he's got some problem with the information, he should create an authoritative site of his own.
Jeez, I'm grumpy these days. :) *relurk*