Apparently this subject about Ancestry is resulting in NCGenWeb sites
being taken offline.
CC's have always been able to put their NCGenWeb sites on any server
they like, and to move them. However, one does expect an orderly
transition in which the site is mirrored at the new location before
the old one is discontinued, and this shouldn't be done on a whim.
Taking a site offline shouldn't have to happen at all.
When this topic first came up, I thought it was just the old
complaint that material contributed to WorldConnect or other sites
within Rootsweb was also showing up from the
Ancestry.com side, and I
tried to reassure readers of my lists that this wasn't an
appropriation of their data.
However, in the past few days a different issue has arisen with
Ancestry, called the Internet Biographical Database. This is a
collection of cached web sites collected by a bot or "spider" that
identifies web pages meeting certain criteria and then indexes them
to be searchable. It's like Google, with one very significant
difference, which is that Ancestry cached them under a long and very
complicated URL that made it look as though Ancestry actually owned
the web page. Readers finding a page through their search wouldn't
necessarily realize that they were on a totally different site,
unrelated to
Ancestry.com, much less know that this caching operation
had been done without consulting the real authors of the sites.
Needless to say, this has generated a storm of protest. As of this
morning, Ancestry had taken the link to the new database off its main
search page, and buried it as an "Unknown" database. They also went
through several revisions of how the real URLs to the pages were
displayed, but none of them was an honest presentation of the URL as
you get from Google.
The important point for the present discussion of NCGenWeb, however,
is that this caching was done on sites that were NOT on Rootsweb
already. The site that my cousin Faye Moran and I maintain
(
http://www.fmoran.com) was among the ones cached, and other people
with extensive personal sites on other servers have reported the same
thing.
If this is why some NCGenWeb pages are suddenly being taken down,
then the CCs for those counties ought to be aware that it probably
doesn't matter what server they're on, Ancestry will find and index
them anyway. Given that reality, why should these sites be removed?
Moving them to a new location means that all other pages linking to
them will have to be revised to include the new URL. Readers who
have them bookmarked will be inconvenienced. And it won't save them
from being cached by Ancestry anyway.
--
Elizabeth Harris
ncgen(a)mindspring.com
Personal genealogy webpage:
http://www.duke.edu/web/chlamy
Winston-Salem NC area genealogy:
http://www.fmoran.com/
HOLDER DNA project:
http://www.mindspring.com/~holderdna/