This School Iteself Requires Internet Education

A North Carolina school webpage containing names, social security numbers and test scores of 619 students were available using Google Search for few days before they were removed by Google.

site:www.catawba.k12.nc.us filetype:xls
site:www.catawba.k12.nc.us filetype:doc
site:www.catawba.k12.nc.us filetype:pdf
site:www.catawba.k12.nc.us SSN

Obviously, parents are a worried lot and Catawba County Schools are blaming Google for trespassing their servers and indexing "password-protected" confidential data. Google however denies the charge - "If there is a password, we cannot access or cache the site"

The school has filed a lawsuit against Google but the chief technology officer of the school has issued a statement that clearly puts the ball in Google's court.

One of the students on the list had a presence on the Web. In Google’s effort to get information on her, one of its spiders latched onto her name in this document. We were not aware that password-protected sites are set up like that.

This is a shame for the school's IT Department that a CTO is saying "we were not aware" - I think he should be fired and the school should hire some more competent staff that understand how to secure a database.

How to protect Google or Yahoo from Indexing my webpages ?

Either add a meta robots noindex, nofollow tag to webpages that you do no want to be indexed by search engines. Or If they don't want any webpage to be available in the public domain, change the robots.txt. [More here]

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

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