I found out about a month ago that one of these sites had an arrest record for someone with my same first and last name. As luck would have it he also is the same race and approximate age as I am. We don't really look alike but there are plenty of people who might google me based on a resume or something without knowing what I look like and confuse me with him.
The site was high on the first page of results for my name and it was extremely frustrating. I'm about to graduate and look for a job and it was embarrassing to think that that's what potential employers would first see. And yet there was nothing I could do about it -- heck, the person wasn't even me.
I'm all for freedom of information and those sites have a perfect right to exist. However, I'm glad that Google also has recognized that their business model doesn't serve the majority of its customers and pushed down the results. After reading the article I checked the results for my name and verified that the offending site disappeared from the first two pages. It may seem like a small thing but I honestly feel more comfortable talking to recruiters now than previously.
Try being listed by some angry vengeful anonymous person on that rip-off report website that will never remove anything under any circumstances (including lawsuit - and the founder claims to live a reclusive life in a mansion guarded by several security persons and always has body guards when he goes out). Anyone can make claims about you. Even if you didn't do business with them. Even if you don't even HAVE a business. They can list your name, address, domains, phone numbers, email address, and anything else they want. They, in turn, don't have to list anything. And google includes their ranks pretty high up on search results.
Have a jilted ex-lover? Have a pissy neighbor that is upset at you? Well, they can get meaningful revenge on you through this service. Every time someone google's you, they can find out all sorts of hideous things about you that are supposedly true. And there's nothing you can do about it.
Oh, you can subscribe to their corporate service for a LOT of money. I forgot about that. Of course, all it will do is put your RESPONSE to the vile and illegitimate complaints at the top of the page, instead of the bottom. It will still, however, show up on search results and so will the vile bullshit the anonymous person posted about you.
The Ed whateverhisnameis guy behind the site is one of the most disgusting and useless human beings on the planet.
Not just that. Thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act the operators of sites like Rip-Off Report have absolute immunity from legal action over their site's content so long as it's not copyright-infringing - it's not even possible to get an injunction forcing them to remove it. Doesn't matter if they know it's defamatory, or if they've made it impossible to find the original poster, or if the original poster can't remove it anyway, or even if they're openly making a profit from charging people to take down "defamatory" entries; they're still totally immune. (There's a workaround: if you can find the original poster you can sue them and get an injunction forcing the site to take down their posts in that lawsuit. Most of these sites make that impossible though.)
The worst thing about them seems to be that they accept reports about private persons, who are much less likely than a business to have the funds to pursue false claims. It is also
clear that their attitude stinks. To quote a recent Forbes article on Ripoff Report [1],
>Asked about a comment alleging
another woman had herpes,
Magedson responds: “This f——
broad probably did something.”
Edit: And look at the comment section on that article.
A general solution for this kind of problem: get other content above them in Google. This is not hard; mugshot pages and the like have very little PageRank mojo. The only reason they're at the top of the results is that there's nothing else with your name to compete.
All you have to do is make a few interesting things (blog posts, github, etc.) with your name on them and post them to sites like reddit, and they'll easily beat any data-combing reputation smear site.
>According to the article that isn't true, mugshot sites have high Google scores because people tend to linger on them.
I can only speculate about causes, but I also have someone in another state with my name (even a matching middle initial) on mugshot sites, and the tiniest other references to me (my wedding registry for example) knocked it off the top Google results page immediately.
As for 99.9% of people not having a GitHub account: so what? I was giving a suggestion relevant to a typical HN user, not advice for the general population. The general advice is to do things like that. The point is that if a wedding registry on theknot.com (Hell, I'm not even sure I made that wedding registry; it might have been auto-gen'd from our Amazon registry) can outsell the undesirable sites on Google, you can easily make ten results happen that knock it off.
GitHub just happens to be an exceptionally good one for an HNer, since it's the kind of thing that an employer is likely to actually want to see.
Most people do have know enough to make sure they have accounts in their name on Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogspot, Pinterest etc. which tend to rank very well in name searches.
This hasn't worked for me. My linkedin and Facebook accounts showed up above the mugshot but everything else was below it. My fairly active github profile, personal site, and twitter profile for example were all lower ranked than the mugshot site.
Google has supposedly been tweaking their algorithms for years to make sites that don't offer unique content rank lower in search. It's a bit puzzling that these mugshot sites can even manage to make the first page if they're all scraping and posting the same content. Most people by now would manage to have a few social media links that would push that stuff off of the first page, right?
I was in the same situation. The person even lived in the same state as me. They are currently in jail, but who would really look that far? I reluctant ly put a few public pictures of myself online hoping that anyone searching for me would notice the difference.
If you're very concerned, create a linkedin account with a nice photo, your college, etc and make this general information public. It will rank very highly and with a cross-reference on your educational info, a future employer worth working for won't mistake you for someone else.
This has nothing to do with Google's "business model", search is about relevance and despite the practices of these sites, I'm sure you can see how their content might be relevant and interesting to visitors. Those who processed the payment were the ones at fault since they were directly facilitating the blackmail.
The site was high on the first page of results for my name and it was extremely frustrating. I'm about to graduate and look for a job and it was embarrassing to think that that's what potential employers would first see. And yet there was nothing I could do about it -- heck, the person wasn't even me.
I'm all for freedom of information and those sites have a perfect right to exist. However, I'm glad that Google also has recognized that their business model doesn't serve the majority of its customers and pushed down the results. After reading the article I checked the results for my name and verified that the offending site disappeared from the first two pages. It may seem like a small thing but I honestly feel more comfortable talking to recruiters now than previously.