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Who is Jayant Madhavan? Google would just as soon you not know. The programmer featured prominently in a recent post on SearchEngineWatch about a troubling new Web-search routine: Madhavan's research would have Google's bots attempt to fill in Web-based forms meant for humans, in an attempt to discover more Web pages to index. Madhavan's picture appears on a Google bio page describing his research. SearchEngineWatch's editors reproduced it next to their post. Google's control-freaky PR reps demanded SearchEngineWatch take it down.

SearchEngineWatch cravenly complied:

UPDATE: Editors' Note: At the request of Google, we've removed the photo of Google engineer Jayant Madhavan, co-author (with Alon Halevy) of the Google Webmaster Central blog post, Crawling through HTML forms, posted by Maile Ohye, Senior Support Engineer at Google. The photo was deleted at Google's request to respect the privacy of Google's corporate data and the personal privacy of Jayant Madhavan.
— Kevin Heisler, Executive Editor, Search Engine Watch

One assumes Heisler's tongue is planted at least lightly in his cheek, since the post dealt with the threat Google's new crawling routine might pose to private corporate data. But if he thought the demand ridiculous — which it is — why ddin't he just refuse to obey it? Valleywag, at least, won't. Here's another picture of Madhavan, the man Google doesn't want you to see, from a 2003 conference:

This image was lost some time after publication.