just found that BMW site is banned by Google ! this is why i love google !

do a search for “bmw.de” in google at this moment, you get nothing returned. according to Matt, a software engineer in google who shares extreamely valuable information on his blog, it’s removed from google index because of fishy javascript redirects on bmw.de web site which is a violation of google’s quality guidelines, specifically the principle of “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.”

it’s good to know that BMW is caught by google, and google does not hesitate to remove such a big brand name from their index. it’s BMW! although there might be stories under the table that we never know, at least it shows that google is willing to make it a fair game for everybody.

it reminds me another recent case that US government demanding last year that Google and other search engines turn over search information to help revive a child protection law. yahoo and msn has handed over the info. however google said no.

what the government wanted was one million random web addresses and records of all Google searches over one week time.

it’s not that the one million random URL involves privacy issues. anybody can get 1 million ramdom urls simply by browsing. what i appreciate is that google treats everyone the same way.

at least, they try to. surely there’re background stories that everage joe like myself would never know. however, how many big guys even try to cast an image that they care about us, small businesses, individuals? very few.

i like the way google said to bmw and government, hey we don’t like dirty tricks like cloaking, your using it? fine, but your gone from my index. you want my information? no, it’s not my resposibility to provide these to you. they are firm on what they should do and what not to do. as a small fish, i see hope here. the playground is leveled.

update: after i finished this post, bmw.de has been back to google index after the redirects are removed and reinclusion is filed. this is fast, for both bmw and google.

luckily i screen captured yesterday when i started writing this post: