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Lately when I google for nLab entries, frequently Google’s result list has the entries labeled as “by Timothy Porter”, with a picture of Tim next to it.
For instance this happens for the search result Google: “nLab model structure for L-infinity algebras” and many others.
What’s going on?
I’d suggest that if Google is now trying to figure out who wrote which nLab entry, we should try to provide it somehow, if possible, with a joint Bourbakian kind of Lab identity. It gets a bit misleading otherwise.
Yeah, I really hate that too.
That’s a bit annoying. I guess that the snapshot that google took was when Tim’s name appeared at the bottom. But even so, from what I’ve read then it shouldn’t have associated it with him.
From a brief search, I can’t see how to associate a generic author in this way. Might be work a question to google about it.
Perhaps they update once a month and I made a typo correction on March 1st! (Strangely I do not get the same thing happening here. ??? Seeing my photo… do you mean from Google+?)
Todd said:I really hate that too. So do I!
(Strangely I do not get the same thing happening here. ??? Seeing my photo… do you mean from Google+?)
I suppose it's your G+ photo. It appears all over the place these days when one googles around the nLab! :-)
I should say: it's not a big deal, there are more important things to worry about, it just adds one more abstrusity to a world already rich in abstrusities. I was just wondering what's going on and if this is something that has been caused intentionally somewhere or if it is just Google loosing it. If it isn't Tim who blackmailed them to attach his photo all over the place, then I guess all we can do is hope for them to fix their "social search" thing, or whatever it's called.
Is it this Google signup for authorship that causes this?
I suppose you signed up there, at some point? Tim?
If that’s what it is, I suppose then what one could do/would have to do is create a G+ account “nLab” and then have the nLab “signup for authorship”. Since the word “nLab” appears on each nLab page, maybe that would make the Google bot label all entries with “by nLab”.
Creating a G+ account for the n-Lab may be a good idea for other purposes as well, but may have its downside if people think they should leave messages there for the active n-Labbers rather than on the Forum.
I have not signed up for that to my knowledge!
I did add contributer to the n-Lab. Out of interest I have now deleted that, so see if the dreaded picture disappears!!! I cannot check ot myself as I never had that phenomenon occur on my machine.
Thanks for the information, Tim. I am feeling bad about making you feel bad about this…
By the way, is there a way that I can tell my Google search page to entirely switch off all that social nonsense? There are more such things that annoy me. All those +1s and shares and whatnot besides search result. Is there a way that I just tell Google not to show this to me? Does anyone know?
At least one can undo miggling address
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copy-crapfree-urls-googles-search-results
I am very glad I have decrapified my firefox.
@Urs. Don’t worry. I’m not feeling bad, slightly intrigued that is all. :-)
Urs - try http://sproutsocial.com/insights/2012/01/disable-google-social-search/
And thanks, Zoran. That’s really helpful.
It looks like you don't exactly sign up for this Google Authorship thing. There are a list of conditions that, if satisfied, will cause Google to identify you as an author, and these conditions could be satisfied by accident. In particular, Google seems to have an @ncatlab.org email address for Tim; do those exist? And then we should be able to disable this by not having the phrase ‘by Tim Porter’. (We actually have ‘Last edited by Tim Porter.’, but Google doesn't seem to know how to interpret that in context.)
This is mystifying! On Google+ I give my usual e-mail @bangor.ac.uk. I have a Gmail address but have never activated it.
Toby, you say “Google seems to have an@ncatlab.org email address for Tim”. How did you find that nugget of information?
There are no ncatlab.org email addresses, by the way, which is why I’d discounted that as a possible route for authorship. But if Google thinks that there are then you’re right, that could be enough.
What would be nice would be if there were some way to override Google’s ad hoc authorship method with, say, a meta tag. But I’ve yet to find a hint that this is possible.
How did you find that nugget of information?
It's my interpretation of #5 at the link that Urs found. Without Google thinking that Tim has an @ncatlab.org address (or @mathforge.org maybe?), that item wouldn't be satisfied, so the process shouldn't work. But somehow it worked!
On advice from someone on Google+ I have changed the CSS class of the “revised by” bit from byline to revisedby. This will make no alteration to the page as it is just a CSS class name.
\begin{rant}
Why Google has decided to use a CSS class name is beyond me. It’s back to the Bad Old Days of non-standard HTML where each browser had its own set of special tags and page authors had to hack the pages together using a variety of “If this browser then do that” methods. CSS class names can be anything that the page author wants and don’t have to mean anything. They are simply to identify an element in the page for CSS or Javascript.
\end{rant}
Unfortunately, byline is baked into the cached entries so either I have to clear the entire cache or we accept that this will only fix things gradually as stuff gets edited – assuming that it does fix things, this is an experiment after all.
Back in the day, I used to clear the entire cache once in a while (when the cache bug got overwhelming), and it didn't seem to slow things down.
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