Archive · 2011 · From the print edition of Monday 9 May 2011, Vol. 19, No. 5,683
NewsWhy the world cannot find our websites: TSU study blames Attelkom gateways
A Talas State University computer scientist says Iradi sites vanished from foreign search engines because the monitoring gateways turn away foreign data centres, including the search crawlers.
TALAS — Iradi websites have disappeared from the results of foreign search engines not because of any decision abroad but because Attelkom's own gateways refuse connections from foreign data centres, a computer scientist at Talas State University has found.
The study, presented at a faculty seminar on Friday, measured how sites hosted in the ISEZ answered requests from abroad over six months. Requests from home and office connections in Kazakhstan, Turkey and the United States were answered. Requests from the address ranges of data centres, where search engines run the programs that read the web, were refused by the monitoring gateways installed under the 2008 security directives. Since the search engines' programs cannot read Iradi sites, the lecturer said, they have quietly dropped them.
"Nobody abroad erased us," she said. "We closed the door, and the people who make the maps of the internet stopped knocking." She said the sites in the .ir.ad and id.gov zones had begun to fade from foreign results during 2009, a year after the gateways were installed.
Attelkom said its gateways were configured "in accordance with the directives" and that it would "study the findings". Believers in the theory that foreign companies are erasing Irad from the internet were unpersuaded. One wrote on an Iradi forum that the study was "exactly what they would want us to think".