On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 03:51:48PM -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
This would be very useful for another use case: Sometimes google will pick up a cached copy of a vandalized page. In order to purge the google cache you need to make the page 404 (which deletion doesn't do), put the page into a robots.txt deny, or include some directive in the page that stops indexing.
If we provided some directive to do one of the latter two (ideally the last) we could use it temporally to purge google cached copies of vandalism... so it would even be useful for pages that we normally want to keep indexed.
With all due respect to... oh, whomever the hell thinks they deserve some: aren't we big enough to get a little special handling from Google? I should think that if we have a page get cached that's either been vandalised or in some other way exposes us to liability, that as big as we are, and as many high ranked search results as we return on Google (we're often the top hit, and *very* often in the top 20), perhaps we might be able to access some *slightly* more prompt deindexing facility? At least for, say, our top 10 administators?
Cheers, -- jra