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Archive for the 'news' Category

Newscorp is indeed dropping out of Google

Published on December 1, 2009 in Google and news. 7 Comments Tags: , .

The big disappearing act

When Rupert Murdoch announced that he would remove his sites from Google (in order to make a deal with Microsoft, so that only Bing would have the NewsCorp pages, as we now assume), he apparently wasn’t kidding. Although all Google web sites still indicate that e.g. MySpace has 179 million pages in the index, the Google API is currently returning another number for that: only 7 million. The total number of NewsCorp pages (a sum of MySpace, IGN, RottenTomatoes, …) has dropped from 192 million to 12 million.

Newscorp is dropping out of Google

(trend via http://trend.visualizor.com/g/1011 )

Which sites are Newscorp?

Let me give you some of his ‘big’ sites and how their # indexed pages have dropped:

  • Myspace: from 179 mio to 7 mio
  • RottenTomatoes: from 4 mio to 100.000
  • IGN: from 4 mio to 300.000
  • Stats.com: from 2.4 mio to 50.000
  • News.com.au: from 1.2 mio to 70.000
  • Sky.com: from 1.4 mio to 85.000

I suspect the Fox, National Geographic, Daily Telegraph, and other sites will soon follow.

Did he send in the robots?

I checked to see if NewsCorp finally started using the robots.txt file, because that’s the way you’re supposed to remove content from Google, not with press conferences.

Myspace:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

RottenTomatoes:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

And the answer there is “no”. So I’m not sure how they tell the Google crawler to stay out.

— UPDATE —

Source of the data:

The numbers come from http://tools.forret.com/newscorp/, which uses the Google Search API. I double-checked the replies from the API: for MySpace.com I get "estimatedResultCount": "6950000" so 7 million, not 179 million. If there’s an error, it’s in the Googleplex.

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Dream turned to nightmare

Published on March 14, 2007 in news. 7 Comments

What's down there? You might have noticed the last couple of days that my blog (and some other of the dozen sites I run) was not always available. You might have experienced time-outs and Error 500 messages. I apologize for that. Let me give you a brief overview of what I went through between last Friday and now.

My (former) hosting company Dreamhost began having intermittent problems one week ago. Some of my sites would go down and then up again. The Dreamhost Status blog talked about “Sporadic brief network outages” and promised to fix them, so I waited. Then, by the end of last week, suddenly all my blogs started going down with the “Error 500: Internal Server Error” message. I got emails from friends to warn me, but thanks to my Montastic account, I had a pretty good idea of when they went down, and up again, and down … A friggin’ Christmas tree!
Continue reading ‘Dream turned to nightmare’

Please make this work again

Published on August 22, 2006 in news. 8 Comments

One of the more popular pages on this blog is the post about Richard and Katie: if his site reached 5.000.000 hits, she would allow him to have a threesome (pleasemakethiswork.com). It’s been three months now, so one wonders: did it work? Well … kind of.

Richard and Katie

Richard, Katie and HollyThe old URL now consists of a redirect page to www.richardandkatie.co.uk (NSFW). On this new site, we learn that the three-way action did take place, it took a full 45 minutes and they’re still editing it into a 20-minute video that will be available soon. The reinforcement they invited goes by the name of Holly, a dark-haired girl with an above-average cup-size.

The video will be put up on the site a.s.a.p its taking a few days due to editing – because believe me there are a couple of things that should be left to the imagination – for one my inability to perform during the first half hour… but more on that another day!!!

Continue reading ‘Please make this work again’

Tsunami 12-12

Published on January 1, 2005 in news. 0 Comments

There’s nothing I can say about this disaster that has not already been said. See the damage it’s done on lvb.net.
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