Question:
What do you get when you subtract….
from…
an identical Google.com search?
Answer:
The Dark Lord Badman’s Guide to Home Education – Arranging An Inspection
Remainder:
Update 28th July 2009:
This piece had a lot of visitors yesterday (but not a single comment ;-)) most of whom were from the UK. A couple of visitors from [W:Google] itself passed through – probably in response to this link.
Of course Google searches are dynamic things and this page itself is now appearing in the .com listing. So for the record here is a picture of the original listings.
Update 2nd August: Curiouser and curiouser.
2 responses to “The curious case of the missing "Badman" page”
It’s the front page of blogdial, not the page you give, that Google’s blocking. You can find out by searching for the URL rather than for keywords. Searching for the URL of a page that Google has indexed always returns the page in the search results, I think.
When you search for http://irdial.com/blogdial/ on google.co.uk you get a number of related pages (including other pages on blogdial), but not the page itself.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Firdial.com%2Fblogdial%2F
When you search for http://irdial.com/blogdial/ on google.com the page itself is the first hit:
http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Firdial.com%2Fblogdial%2F
Note that searching for the page you mention returns it as the only hit: it’s not blocked at all.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fgrahambadman.blogspot.com%2F2009%2F07%2Farranging-inspection.html
I haven’t managed to work out which exact page on blogdial this rather inept censorship attempt is targeting, but there are plenty of candidates.
I see someone has issued a foi request about this – http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cease_and_desist_notices
Unsurprisingly, there hasn’t been a response yet.