Google Using Sites for Own Purposes Then Dropping Them?

[roadies]

Over on Matt's blog, Amit left a very interesting comment that I'd like to share in case it gets pulled:

Hey Matt,

Welcome back.

If a website isn’t showing on Google - we need to check the site to figure out why. Good. But, what should we do if a site is only showing where it serves Google needs - and banned when it doesn’t? Isn’t this a case where Google should be doing the cheking?

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Example:

Search for: % of African American in Los Angeles. At the top of the page is a Google Q&A answer - 11% - based on data retrieved from this page.

But the site itself has been removed from the main index. No pages in site command. Not allinurl command. Not in info command. Not in domain search.

Crawling been done pretty recently. Here is the June 2006 cache.

Thus - here is an example of a site that has been deemed good enough to serve as an Answer reference for the Google Q&A feature – yet has been banned from the main index.

Sneaky.

Seems interesting. I know the Answers team is seperate from the Search team, but this still doesn't seem right.