Deindexing: A Thing?

October 12, 2016

There was the right to be forgotten. There were reputation management companies promising to scrub unwanted information for indexes using humans, lawyers (a different species, of course), and software agents.

Now I have learned that “dozens of suspicious court cases, with missing defendants, aim at getting web pages taken down or deindexed.” The write up asserts:

Google and various other Internet platforms have a policy: They won’t take down material (or, in Google’s case, remove it from Google indexes) just because someone says it’s defamatory. Understandable — why would these companies want to adjudicate such factual disputes? But if they see a court order that declares that some material is defamatory, they tend to take down or deindex the material, relying on the court’s decision.

Two thoughts:

  1. Have reputation management experts cooked up some new broth?
  2. How quickly will the lovely word “deindex” survive in the maelstrom of the information flow.

I love the idea of indexing content. Perhaps there is a new opportunity for innovation with the deindexing thing? Semantic deindexing? Structured deindexing? And my fave unstructured deindexing in federated cloud based data lakes. I wish I were 21 years old again. A new career beckons with declassification codes, delanguage processing, and even desmart software.

Stephen E Arnold, October 22, 2016

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