fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

Seems that the White House is doing its very best not to get indexed by just about every search engine under the sun, if their robots.txt file is any indication. Interpreted in SEO terms, they’re obviously tied up in a frenzy of privacy protection, trying to lurk far off from the madding crowd in the dark, like the shady spooks they are so very much in love with.

Investors beware: if this should turn into a massive trend, it could seriously impact Google’s business – here’s one PR 7 blogger who is not prepared to take any more crap from them.

Last month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation received some flak from anonymization experts (ourselves included) for their less-than-state-of-the-art white paper recommending some stragegies. Well, they’ve listened and issued an update now.

One would have thought that a company of Google’s resources and technical savvy would be able to prevent further downloads of their established spy- and malware. The more so as this specific download link is still being propagated across a multitude of blogs and fora. After all, they’ve had three full days to do it. But that’s precisely what’s not happening.

Hardly four days to oblivion – the deluge of PR-hurting reports has finally found its first deserving casualty: GWA is no more, at least for the time being. Still, it’s definitely a first victory and hopefully not the last one.

Only three days after its beta launch, GWA has arguably broken a dubious record: that of being one of the buggiest pieces of software ever unlashed upon the unsuspecting general public. Let the downloader beware!

We’ve detected another Google Web Accelerator IP range. Make sure you adjust your existing .htaccess code to cover it!

Here’s a page you can display to people who you are restricting from accessing your site because they’re using Google’s nefarious spyware. Plus some graphics we’re donating to the public domain: spread the message!

And on and on it goes with even the most acquiescent, docile and “we’re so excited to be a part of Google’s dream yadda yadda” industry pimping sites voicing at least some mild concerns about where Google’s latest gizmo may be heading.

In what may arguably be their greatest PR debacle ever, Google’s new Web Accelerator is encountering heavy duty flak by tech savvy webmaster, marketers and privacy buffs across the board. Here’s a first selection of gripes.

Here are the first verified Google proxy IPs as employed by their new Web Accelerator service. You’ll probably hear a lot more of this in future.

Efficiently organzing XML data now, the new implementation gives this one-man labor-of-love search engine additional clout its big boy competitors could well do with themselves.

Drunk Men Work Here blog displays its search engine spider traffic as a binary tree - really cool, geeky stuff!

Want to view your web site as seen by a search engine spider in realtime? In contrast with other spider simulators abounding on the Net, this one’s a real world search engine spider spilling all the beans.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a well intended guide on anonymous blogging. Unfortunately, their technical advice on defeating the search engines as privacy hazards is disturbingly naive.