In May, I published a deep dive on a Pakistani firm that had just been charged w/ shipping fentanyl analogs to the US and was behind a sprawling empire of scam ghostwriting, app and logo design companies that were spending millions on Google ads to promote their scam businesses.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/pakistani-firm-shipped-fentanyl-analogs-scams-to-us/
The story received a decent amount of attention, but it almost immediately dropped off Google search entirely. Searching for the headline brought only links to other sites covering my report. This persisted for almost two weeks and I never got a satisfactory answer from Google about why the story dropped from search.
Just read a story at Ars Technica about how a tech CEO who was trying to quash reporting about his alleged misdeeds used a feature in Google known as Refresh Outdated Content to trick Google into deindexing the unflattering stories about him. The method he reportedly used was working until last month. Makes me wonder how widely known this bug was.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/google-tool-misused-to-scrub-tech-ceos-shady-past-from-search
https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/114512527951494345
@briankrebs@infosec.exchange
I don't think it's a bug...
"Perception management" firms have a pretty solid income de-Streisendifying bad stories from the internet.
If you look for specific Pedo Republicans stories, they are often harder to find, or downranked on Google, comparing with #duckduckgo
@briankrebs@infosec.exchange I contacted “Danny Sullivan” to ask why my articles weren’t appearing — seemingly suppressed — in Google search results. He assured me this wasn’t the case but offered no guidance on how to make my content more prominent. I’m left wondering why other, far less relevant material outranks such an important message!
@briankrebs@infosec.exchange bug or feature? 🤨
@HarlemSquirrel@mastodon.social @briankrebs@infosec.exchange At this point, it's a bug if it gets exposed. But a feature touted closed doors lol
@pheonix@fosstodon.org @HarlemSquirrel@mastodon.social @briankrebs@infosec.exchange Yes, this reeks of "feature with plausible deniability". There is utterly no reasonable basis for anything in search processing URLs as case insensitive.
path element of a uri is case sensitive
google's assumption that differently-cased otherwise-identical uris are equivalent is invalid
websites supporting case-insensitive path elements are just drowning themselves in their own SEO bullshit
everyone is wrong here
CC: @pheonix@fosstodon.org @HarlemSquirrel@mastodon.social @briankrebs@infosec.exchange
BrianKrebs
