A user found on Google pricing and model names for new dual-core laptop computers from Dell and excitedly posted them to an online forum, sending Dell officials scrambling to get the unannounced products off the Internet.
Google’s cache and a Dell FTP site that inadvertently made specifications available for forthcoming laptops and other products have been vigorously scrubbed a day after someone discovered an Excel spreadsheet containing that information online.
CNet noted a link to the spreadsheet had been posted on NotebookReview.com. The file has since been removed, but not before CNet was able to determine pricing for the dual-core equipped Core Duo machines from Dell price between $900 and $1,500.
The offending material has since been removed from Google and purged from its cache. The article noted Yahoo had likewise deleted the material from its search engine cache as well.
Gary Price at SearchEngineWatch fixed blame for the incident on Dell’s webmasters, and not the search engines:
Every webmaster who places content on publicly accessible servers should have a basic understanding of how web crawlers work and that many large engines (and even some verticals) cache content.
Google is the most widely used web engine but the webmaster who only focuses their attention on Google might not realize that the searcher who knows about cached content, and then goes looking for it, will know about many other web caches.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
