A website that deletes itself once indexed by Google

I had a client once who had something similar, although unintentionally. She approached me because her website &quot;kept getting hacked&quot; and she didn&#x27;t trust the original developers to solve the security problems... And rightly so!<p>There were two factors that, together, made this happen: first, the admin login form was implemented in JS, and if you went to log in with it with JS disabled, it wouldn&#x27;t verify your credentials. And it submitted via a GET request. Second, once you were in the admin interface, you could delete content from the site by clicking on an X in the CMS. Which, as was the pattern, presented you with a JS alert() prompt before deleting the content... via a GET request.<p>Looking at the server logs around the time it got &quot;hacked&quot;, you could see GoogleBot happily following all the delete links in the admin interface.

I&#x27;m surprised there are so many people on Hacker News asking &quot;why?&quot;.<p>Hackers don&#x27;t need a reason, other than it being clever, novel, fun, etc. But if you want a reason there are plenty:<p>* art: there are numerous interpretations of this<p>* fun: this is sort of the digital equivalent of a &quot;useless box&quot; <a href="http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/ef0b/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thinkgeek.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;ef0b&#x2F;</a><p>* science: experiment to see how widespread a URL can be shared without Google becoming aware of it<p>* security: embed unique tokens in your content to detect if it has leaked to the public

It&#x27;s a digital embodiment of coolness; once the masses can find out about it, it isn&#x27;t cool anymore and the coolness is gone. Literally.

An alternative would be to check for the browser <i>user agent</i> and delete the website right at that point and return a 404 page to the Google crawler bot. Then Google won&#x27;t have a static copy of the website.

What about the opposite? A website that created when it is indexed? Start with nothing and content is added each time the site is visited by Googlebot, or shared on Facebook, tweeted, posted on Reddit, etc. The website exists only so that it can be shared, and the act of sharing it defines what the website is.

Cool, but why? ( And shoulden&#x27;t we invent digital Baroque art before inventing digital postmodernism?)

Thank you.<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/cjDeLEb.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;cjDeLEb.png</a><p>EDIT: What&#x27;s with the downvote hate? Somebody actually posted a valid key...

&gt;Why would you do such a thing? My full explanation was in the content of the site. (edit: ...which is now gone)<p>So anyone really understood why he did this?

Anyone know the origin or have an archive?

Not sure if I see this as &quot;art&quot; or something. I mean, <i>irrevocably deletes itself</i> could be attached to a thousand arbitrary things.<p>- deleted after 100 visitors<p>- deleted if visited with IE 6.0 for the first time<p>- deleted if referrer is Facebook<p>- ...

Snapchat for websites...hmmmm perhaps.

I see some potential use of this, for example as soon as Google crawlers reach the site I know that it is accessible from outside and I destroy the site.

&quot;Death is reason for the beauty of butterfly&quot;

I have to say I&#x27;m not usually a fan of conceptual art, but kudos - the concept is great. Keep experimenting!

I would be interested in similar experiments but with a couple of minor variations to see the effects of each:<p>1. Sending the NOINDEX meta tag<p>2. Combining meta tags<p>3. Monitoring for a referrer URL that matches a Google search page to catch the 1st non-sneaky user coming from the index.<p>4. Monitoring other search engines and their behaviors.

grep Googlebot &#x2F;var&#x2F;www&#x2F;log&#x2F;* &amp;&amp; rm -rf &#x2F;var&#x2F;www&#x2F;site

How about detecting GoogleBot traffic and deleting when it has crawled your website?

<a href="https://github.com/mroth/unindexed/blob/master/views/alive.ect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mroth&#x2F;unindexed&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;views&#x2F;alive.e...</a>

Like a snow angel? Art that auto destructs? Stay in the moment.

What problem does it solve? EDIT: that was an honest question.

Guess I better clone the source before its deleted..

Oh I was thinking something very similar few minutes ago and when I opened hacker news and saw this post I was amazed

a) One can also use referer to check whether a visitor has come from Google to trigger the deletion (in addition to &quot;seek itself in Google&quot;).<p>b) robots.txt shall get the same results, plus, no cached content at Google, unlike &quot;deleting itself&quot;, which the cache content remains at Google.

You mean a website which can&#x27;t be used with Chrome or even with Android itself, on any browser.

This makes me think about the immensely cool self destructing sunglasses in Mission Impossible

I have a thought that I will forget immediately once somebody asks me what it is.<p>Now I am an artist, yay :-)

@Cjlm, what type of problem does it solve?