Betalogue

This is a strange one. Yesterday, while doing a search in Google, I found a reference to a web page that I had helped design that was on my HomePage web site at www.mac.com. I didn’t want this page to be indexed or archived by Google, but of course, the automatic web page design tools provided by Apple do not include the option of adding the required meta tags in the page’s header.

I should have added the tags myself manually right after creating the pages, but I didn’t, and one of these pages ended up being indexed by Google just the same, even though only a handful of people knew about it. So I went to the Google web site to find out how to get Google to remove a page from its index and cache.

After a certain amount of fruitless browsing, I ended up using Google’s internal search engine (used to search for pages on the company’s own web site). One of the first results of my search was this page, which explains what you need to do.

The problem is that this page refers you to Google’s automatic URL removal system (once you have included the appropriate meta tag in your page). But when you click on that link in Safari, you are taken to… a page that’s encoded in some Asian language!

Very strange.

I ended up copying the URL and opening it in Camino, which worked just fine. But for some reason if you try to use that page with Safari, you get Asian text instead of the expected English.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Friday, September 24th, 2004 at 12:05 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.