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It wasn't very clear to me how google could "shut down" a site. So I checked the archive of the site in the wayback machine, linked in the article. Here's the u
by graeme 11y ago
It wasn't very clear to me how google could "shut down" a site. So I checked the archive of the site in the wayback machine, linked in the article. Here's the url:
https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/ https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/
So they were running on Google site's. The site violated that TOS. While I don't know the particulars, this seems like less of a story than if Google had somehow wiped an ordinary domain from search results.
- amadeusw 11y agoNone of the blog post links work, though. Does anyone have a working link to a sample story?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- greglindahl 11y agoOver at Team Wayback, we recommend that bloggers use "save page now" on individual posts, or use blog software that does this for them. In this case, there wasn't any save-page-now involved. We got the front page of the site on Dec 22, but didn't try to crawl the subpages (the actual posts) until Feb 6, which is after the site was disabled. This lag between front page and interior pages is pretty typical behavior for our Heretrix crawl queues, alas.
- pinewurst 11y agoAnd it looks like Team Wayback has now successfully captured at least the articles I tested. Note: you have to select the latest capture as the default still shows the Goog's off-line messages.
- greglindahl 11y agoThe live site came back up. Looks like 100% of the sub-pages are now in the Wayback. I didn't look to see if it was our crawler or save-page-now that put them there.
- powertower 11y agoWhat part of the TOS did they violate?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- chillingeffect 11y agoThere's this from [1]: "Google may also stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits to our Services at any time." https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/ https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/
- clort 11y agoit doesn't seem possible to violate that term
- Terr_ 11y agoUser-Violation != Provider-Choice
- kafkaesq 11y agoYes, of course there's an ass-covering provision in there that says they can shut you down at any time, with no recourse. We'd still like to know why they did so, in this case.
- gnu8 11y agoThey were advocating for the interests of labor over the interests of large high tech companies. Any success that group attains against Amazon would also damage Google's interests.
- elevenfist 11y agoWhy has this been downvoted? Remember all the stories we've heard about Google refusing to give earned bonuses to employees who shared their salary information? What about the google exec who was blacklisted for the offhand comment that software engineers should probably unionize? We've seen plenty of evidence on HN of this sentiment. Though Google today might have changed its views.
- qntmfred 11y agoI had the same initial reaction. I wonder why they used google sites as a hosting platform to begin with. there's a dozen better, more visible alternatives.
- bluejekyll 11y agoFor any non-technical folk, it's a very simple to setup and use service. Not the best option by any means.
- Twirrim 11y agoIt's really easy to create a squarespace site, or a wordpress blog, or pretty much any number of things. Hell at the likely TPS for the site it would be easy to self host on a small VPS.
- brianwawok 11y agoWhat % of humans can set up a WordPress install on a VPS? .001%?
- joshmn 11y agoShared hosting is still magnitudes ahead of VPS deploys in terms of numbers, and in those environments it's easier than creating a Gmail account.
- paulddraper 11y agoHow many VPS's are free (indefinitely)? None that I know of.
- foota 11y agoYeah, like AWS