

Google Inadvertently Classifies Google Places As A “Content Farm” - GVRV
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/31/google-inadvertently-classifies-google-places-as-a-content-farm-and-removes-from-search-index/

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mmastrac
Nice early April 1st gag. The big giveaway is him posting the "off-the-record"
comment at the end. No matter how deep into AOL he gets, he'd never give up an
off-the-record comment.

This is a pretty rough gag though, if not a little mean:

"That has angered Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora, who has reportedly lashed
out at the webspam team privately at various sales events for targeting some
of Google’s most valuable partners. Tellingly, Arora recently returned back
from a two week jaunt in the Caribbean with Demand Media CEO Richard
Rosenblatt, reported TMZ, where the two spent time on Rosenblatt’s new $40
million megayacht pictured left and called (I’m not kidding), The Adsense.
Demand Media, worth around $2 billion, generates approximately 100% of its
revenues from low quality content wrapped in Google Adsense ads"

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eapen
I am not keen on these April 1st jokes being posted on HN and it's going to
get annoying with all these "true or not true" stories (especially when some
truth is added to false articles). I can understand such articles making it to
the frontpage of Reddit or Digg and even on Twitter but please discourage this
activity from HN.

In fact HN, should do an April Fools celebration of allowing everyone to down-
vote every article that is an April Fools joke.

~~~
rhizome
April Fools used to be "Slashdot Vacation Day" until I stopped visiting them
entirely.

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WillyF
This joke is a little too believable considering that Google has banned itself
multiple time before. Danny Sullivan tweeted on this:

"google bans itself. april fools! wait, was real <http://selnd.com/hVXAkZ> &
real <http://selnd.com/cM5LBq> & real <http://selnd.com/ebJiNB> :)"

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JonnieCache
Definitely april fools. The templating logic for the results page layout would
obviously not be affected by the pagerank algorithm. Pagerank could not even
be applied to pages which are generated using pagerank, this would entail a
feedback loop.

Pleasingly deadpan prank though.

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pdaviesa
I've always wanted to pull the following April fools prank - get into the
office super early and leave some controversial whiteboard sketch in several
of the conference rooms (ie major reorg, acquisition, company move , etc) and
just see what happens throughout the day.

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charleso
It's a clever gag, but titles like this will unfortunately show up in future
HN searches.

Would it be appropriate to adopt an April 1st etiquette of some sort? Say, an
[April Fools] tag in the title?

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aaronbrethorst
[April 1st]

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unreal37
It's not April 1st though.

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lsb
A few billion people in Asia would disagree. In Tokyo right now, it's 7am
April 1.

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barrydahlberg
And it's lunch time down here in NZ at the start of the world :)

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yanw
Once again Google is the subject of the Arrington April fools' post, always
controversial.

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GrandMasterBirt
Good for anti-competitive claims MS makes. Google claims each department tries
to independently make the best product available and no favors are given to
google products. This is a perfect example that google's content spam does not
care if the spam comes from within google.

Also gives me lots of confidence in their webspam team.

