Create a Website That Self-Destructs When Google Indexes It

Story by

Mic Wright

Reporter, TNW

Mic Wright is a journalist specialising in technology, music and popular culture. He lives in Dublin. He is on Twitter at @brokenbottleboy. (show all) Mic Wright is a journalist specialising in technology, music and popular culture. He lives in Dublin. He is on Twitter at @brokenbottleboy.

You know we’re dealing with something unusual when we write about a site that we can’t actually link to anymore. Unindexed was an experiment by Matthew Rothberg that created a website which continuously searched Google for itself.

When the site finally discovered itself in the search results, it was permanently deleted. That happened on February 24.

Rotherberg describes Unindexed as “an experiment in the nature of ephemerality and persistence on the Web.” The link to the Uninvited site was shared by word of mouth and postal mail initially.

Visitors were encouraged to contribute posts to the site and share the link with others but warned that how they spread it would effect how quickly Google’s search bots discovered it.

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Unindexed survived for 22 days before being indexed and deleted. However, if you want to build you own self-destructing site, Rothberg has shared the code on GitHub.

➤ Unindexed [Matthew Rothberg]

Image credit: Matthew Rothberg