# Search Engines and retiring old information

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2002-11-02T08:40:45Z



Wired NewsKristen Philipkoski
02:00 AM Nov. 01, 2002 PST

The journal Science retracted eight of Hendrik Schon's discredited research papers on Thursday, but the information still lurks on the Internet.


In September, an investigative committee found that 17 papers authored by Schon, considered to be major breakthroughs in physics, were mostly fabrications.

But a Web search on Schon's name turns up more pages touting those "accomplishments" than his firing in September by Bell Labs, the result of his fabricating that data.
So this is an important issue, but not an impossible one. It relates to the story about "The Google Gods"CNET News.comDoes search engine's power threaten Web's independence? 
By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
October 31, 2002, 4:00 a.m. PT 

Patrick Ahern has witnessed the power of Google--and the difficulties of trying to do business without it. 

Data Recovery Group, where he is president, would typically come up around the fourth listing on Google's popular search engine last year. Then in January, when Google removed the company from its listings without explanation, Data Recovery saw a 30 percent drop in business.I have also suffered as I wait for Google to update it's database. It just today finally dumped my old URL's and rolled over to my new ones making my site google searchable again. It took months for Google to index me properly when I first got started. It was very frustrating. Having said that, I've run a search engine and I know how difficult it is to keep everyone happy.
blog theme song on... So maybe blogs, meta-indexes and things like weblogs.com to keep track of updates... basically the whole xml thing will help solve the issue of keep track of "the living web"...





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