Googler Blogs, Then UnBlogs – Updated

Via GB’d: Hmmm. Check this out. Philipp found a Google employee who was posting openly about Google, and has some excerpts from the posts on his site. Am getting smart on this but…Seems a fellow started at Google, starting blogging about Google, said some not so nice things and probably violated internal policies to boot, and then quickly blanked his posts. This is his site (ninetyninezeroes – get it?). Empty, for the most part. And no Google cache or URL info. Clearly his site is not in Google’s index – I searched for some of the strings in the text Phillip has on his site, not there. His site is on Blogger, and had been up long enough for Google to index it, certainly. So, it seems, the site has been taken out manually, something Google claims to never do.

However, I did find it in Yahoo’s cache.

And here is even more – including a discourse on Google’s benefits, and an overview of a Google party at last week’s sales conference in SF. Highlights:

“google demands employees that are 90th percentile material, so what’s with the 50th percentile compensation? the packages would’ve been decent when the company was pre-IPO, but let’s be honest here… a stock option with a strike price of $188 just doesn’t have the same value as the ones of yesteryear. even microsoft adjusted their base salaries to 66th percentile years ago when it was clear that their stock options weren’t as much a part of the total compensation package as it used to be. for a post-IPO company like google, it only seems fair that they adjust things accordingly.”

“i must say, 1500+ sales people getting drunk at a company sponsored party feels remarkably like a frat party.”

I am trying to confirm this guy actually worked at Google, and that this is not some elaborate hoax…the fact that it’s not in Google’s index certainly indicates something is up…

So I do wonder. How is it that Yahoo has it indexed, and Google does not? I’m asking. More when/if I hear more.

UPDATE: The fellow is for real, I am told by Google. Awaiting further explication on the index issue…it’d be relatively simple to test how quickly a normal blogger blog is indexed by Google….

UDPATE 2: A Google source on good authority tells me A/This was a new employee who violated some internal legal and financial policies (in his original post he talked about financial information and hinted at cool products coming up), B/He was called on it by Google management, and reacted by instantly taking down his posts and C/After sleeping on it, folks at Google sat down with him and agreed that he would take some of the more sensitive stuff out and then repost his musings. I’m told a side by side comparison of before and after exists somewhere out there on the web, but I have not found it….As for D/ whether or not Google actually pulled him from the cache or the index, the answer from Google is a definitive no, Google says that in fact their bot simply had not found the site, which had few to no inbound links – not an easy admission certainly, but one that I will take at face value. If anyone has any data about how quickly the average blog is found by indices, I’d be interested. I’m also curious how Yahoo found it so quickly. In any case, the site sure has juice now, and both the original post, as well as the new one and all the commentary, will be in the amber of the index forevermore.