Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:23 UTC
1. In Google, search en.wikipedia.org for 'privacy': http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aen.wikipedia.org%20privacy Results: 153,000,000 results! This is because "Privacy" is in the footer, so Google matches every page. Expected: Turn off indexing of common areas. I added some notes on how to do this to http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_best_to_search_or_spider_mediawiki_systems and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_Exclusion_Standard#Directives_within_a_page , for Google the key is <!--googleoff: index--> ... <tt><!--googleon: index--> and old spiders use <NOINDEX>. You could counter-argue that if a word appears on a page and the user pastes it into a search engine, then the engine MUST find that page. But I think the value of eliminating all those search results outweighs this.
* NOINDEX is not valid in XHTML. * the google only comment is ... only for google. That would not really fix the issue.
Hmmm.... I think there are several million people who use Google for their searches (call me naive...)
(In reply to comment #2) > Hmmm.... I think there are several million people who use Google for their > searches (call me naive...) The point as raised was that Google isn't the be-all and end-all; people can and do use alternative search engines, which that particular special case wouldn't affect. So yes, it would fix the problem for a lot of cases, but not all.
Marking as WONTFIX, looks like google is smart enough to give us back pages related to "privacy".
