Google seems to be censoring Norman Finkelstein's website

Why can't you find normanfinkelstein.com on google?
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2009/04/why-cant-you-find-normanfinkelsteincom-on-google.html

Question: Is google censoring normanfinkelstein.com?
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=4eac9dbdc706b157&hl=en

Results 1 - 100 of about 415,000 for "Norman Finkelstein". (0.52 seconds)

I think the commenter above is not clear about what the issue is. Google is no longer linking to Norman Finkelstein's website. His website is Normanfinkelstein.com and is not found on a google search. The google search the commenter provides shows this. Google links to articles by and about Norman Finkelstein, but not his website. Until recently, and currently on other search engines, normanfinkelstein.com was the first site shown on a google search. Now it has disappeared from a google search.

In education news, Clark University in Massachusetts has canceled a scheduled speech by Holocaust scholar Norman Finkelstein after the Jewish campus group Hillel objected to his appearance. Finkelstein is known as one of the most prominent academic critics of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Clark University President John Bassett said Finkelstein’s speech on campus "would invite controversy and not dialogue or understanding.”

thanks for this. Visit Norman's site every couple of weeks. what the hell is up. This man is so courageous. What is the lobby doing to him now?

what the hell is up with google. Is someone threatening them ?

I think this is a web site configuration error. The web site has a technical error which may have opted it out of Google indexing. There's a file on every web site called "robots.txt" which allows a site to "opt out" of systems that automatically read sites, like Google. The one for "http://www.normanfinkelstein.com" is set up wrong, and I suspect Google is interpreting it as an "opt out".

Here's the technical explanation.

The "robots.txt" file at "http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/robots.txt" is a redirect. That link will take you to "http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/robots.txt/" (note the trailing slash). That's wrong.

Try putting "http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/robots.txt" into a "robots.txt" checker like "http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml", and you get the message "ERROR: Redirect detected. Please insert the actual file URL".

Tell the site webmaster to fix this, then log into Google webmaster tools and use Google's robots.txt checker on his own site.

Looking back in the Internet Archive, that "robots.txt" file used to have a different problem. I suspect somebody tried to fix it recently and botched the job.

Posted by: John Nagle | April 12, 2009 at 09:47 PM

---------------------------------------------------

Nagle's points are probabaly correct.
I noticed that ngf's site is getting some sort of update at the moment: http://code.google.com/p/normanf-gsource/

I would not be surprised if this was related to the site's disappearance.

Posted by: Gary | April 13, 2009 at 05:45 AM

I was just forwarded this explanation and am very happy to learn that it is not an intentional act by Google. Thanks for posting the comment with explanation above.

repost how do you explain that a few weeks ago you could easily get to Norman's site

The site is now restored to Google. It appears as the first search. However, the technical issue described above and assumed (hoped) to be the problem is unresolved.