Google Spelling Issues Side Effect of Belgium Ruling?

Ha! I found this on Digg and then had to check for myself. Apparently Google has spelling issues today. The company name is missing a letter.

Maybe they are still upset about the ruling by a Belgium court that says that Google violated copyright laws. The post on the official Google Blog is a rather lackluster response. I like the "great value and provide critical information to Internet users" bit. I didn't know a news tease was critical information. Thanks, Google, for clarifying.

The other fun snippet is the "nearly universally accepted" standard of the robots.txt file. Except that the Googlebot doesn't always seem to follow info in the robotx.txt file. I always find it fascinating when they say it is the simplest way to avoid having certain pages or sections of a website indexed, only to find those exact pages or sections of a website indexed even though the robots.txt file says no. Of course, with Google's cache, it takes forever to get those pages completely removed, even when you make a request.

I'll agree that content providers need to ask for content to be removed, but I also think that going to the courts can be the quickest way to having the request fulfilled. We take telecommunications companies and others to court to get swift action, why not Internet companies like Google?

It will be interesting to see what happens to copyrighted content on the Web after this. Google has had its issues in China, and now it is running into walls in Europe. Understandable as there isn't universal copyright law, or universal enforcement of copyright law. No matter what, it is a slippery slope, and Google stumbled.

Will the company some day join the list of companies built on contradictions?

Feb. 2, 2007 UPDATE: An enterprising person by the name of "K" pointed out a spelling error: "snipet" is indeed spelled "snippet" and has since been corrected.

As for being a "Snarky chump," you can't know one until you've been one.

Thanks for the tip, K.