Over at Bill Dembski’s Uncommon Descent weblog, the administration has found it convenient in the past to excise comments or posts that, once criticism comes in, they belatedly find were ill-advised, or just plain stupid in content. There was the notable incident of Dembski railing about how Jeff Shallit’s deposition in the Kitzmiller case last year must have been horrible, and that was why Shallit didn’t testify, and why the deposition wasn’t available for general access. IIRC, three separate posts made those false claims about Shallit. Once it became clear that the deposition had been publicly available all that time and that Dembski had been talking a bunch of demonstrably false nonsense (as when Ed Brayton quoted from the TMLC brief requesting exclusion of Shallit’s testimony in limine, showing that the defense was the party most eager to keep Shallit off the witness stand [Actually, on review, it was a quote from the ruling on the defense in limine motion.]), those several posts suddenly and silently vanished away.

Of course, people could simply turn to the Internet Archive or the Google cache to see what used to be part of UD and wasn’t anymore.

Apparently, the UD administrators, in their search for the more perfect memory hole, have discovered the power of excluding robots from their site and making specific requests to un-archive and un-cache their site. Good-bye, Internet Archive! Sayonara, Google! Hello, personal revisionism!

Update: David Springer is claiming that the UD departure from Google was not their idea, and that somebody at Google must have had it in for them and expunged UD from the Google cache all on their own.

Update: Now Springer says it was all my fault. Hmm. There’s no evidence, natch, but I’ve password-protected the BUUD site so that if there were some problem inherent in it being accessible to Google, that should now not be a problem.