in reply to Re: OT: Preserving Information
in thread OT: Preserving Information

How about for instance Google's cache and similar? Unethical? Illegal?

However much this may seem like I am trying to talk back here, I am (maybe for once) not - I am sincerely curious. :) Just too tired to come up with a good way of asking.

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Re: OT: Preserving Information
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Oct 08, 2002 at 16:43 UTC
    I don't have a problem with a pure cache - one that will check whether information is stale before serving it. But caches that don't check the backend are a gray area. Personally, I don't have a problem with them, as long as they have a reasonable expiration period (that is, if the backend data is removed or modified, the cache should reflect that after a not-to-long period). But if a cache doesn't expire documents that have disappeared, or where the expire period is unreasonably large I think they are wrong. It might have legal problems as well.

    Abigail

[reply]
      I don't know how long Google keeps their cache, I can't find that information, but I know that I've upon occassion found sites that were gone (by some time) via their cache instead. Supposedly I guess that the cache would disappear when the site is no longer indexed, ie due to disappearance, but that is a tough one - a site might be down, when do they consider it gone? OTOH, any site owner may request that Google does not cache their site, which is somthing like an opt-out solution then I guess.

      By your definition, I guess theirs is a grey area then.

      You have moved into a dark place.
      It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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