Google launches new blog search tool... that includes all of LJ!

[drscott]

Bad news, kiddies. I, like many of you, have my settings set to exclude search engines, so my postings about weird topics don't end up as answers to queries on Google and the like. Well, Google has launched a blog search tool which doesn't respect the setting. This means all of your security-through-obscurity feelings about LJ are out the window. "Friends only" is now the way to go if you want to remain free of prying eyes. Which means friends who casually read your journal will have to join LJ to see anything.

Comments

[bluedevilsf.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this! I think "Friends Only" is the way I'm going to go with this now. I've already run across a couple posts in the search results that I'd rather not be accessible by a search engine.

[ruggerguy7.livejournal.com]

I have kind of been worrying about that for some time, so most of my stuff has been friends only.

[fuzzygruf.livejournal.com]

I'm glad there's a blogsearch tool. I'm often trying to find some old post that I vaguely remember. It looks like it doesn't go back very far, though. It's advanced search techniques give you a beginning date parameter of March 2005.

It totally sucks that they got around the "no spiders" setting, though. They're sure to catch well-deserved flak.

[phornax.livejournal.com]

It's worse than you say. They're picking up friends-only posts!!!

(:::gulp:::)

[fuzzygruf.livejournal.com]

I've searched for items that I have listed as "friends-only" and didn't get any results. Were the "friends-only" posts that you found ever public? Once it's public and indexed, Google has always kept a record of it.

[phornax.livejournal.com]

Quite possibly. And the other good thing is that they appear to have been indexing only since the beginning of July.

scarier

[blt4success66.livejournal.com]

I put my name in the search line and found that my comments to other's journals are included. Big brother is watching with googly eyes!

Security

[poodler.livejournal.com]

I've always friends only or private screened blogs which I don't want the general public to read. I recently removed my last name after a googling of my name brought up the journal.

[that-dang-otter.livejournal.com]

Anyone who relies on the no-indexing tag for privacy has always been seriously deluded. I don't think that indexing of pages that are already publically accessible is such a big deal... it's arguably impolite, but what's public is public, and it isn't indexing anything that wasn't a few mouse clicks away anyway.

Incidentally, I'd always thought of that tag as marking things that aren't worth indexing... a service to the indexer, rather than a declaration of your personal desires.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

It's true that you shouldn't put anything into public access that you would be mortified to have your mom see. But OTOH, the abuse of databases like the Usenet archive for purposes of screening job candidates and the like wouldn't be a problem if it were not for search engines, and the robots.txt convention has been honored by essentially every major search engine. So if you want "friendlies" to find you organically, by arriving through links, it's necessary to keep it public, and yet you still might have reasonable objections to being indexed. Unless we want to create a society with no privacy whatever, which is a defensible position, but only if everyone's in the same boat....