“Someone exploited a flaw in Google’s system by submitting URLs with different capitalization patterns.”
A journalist found that articles about a tech CEO’s felony domestic violence arrest had been scrubbed from Google search results. The trick was embarrassingly simple. Someone submitted URLs with altered capitalization to Google’s “Refresh Outdated Content” tool. Google tried to recrawl the modified URLs, got 404 errors, and delisted all versions of the page including the legitimate originals. Google confirmed the vulnerability and says it deployed a fix. The fact that this tool existed with such an obvious flaw means you have to wonder how many other inconvenient articles have already been disappeared the same way.