I apologize for the liberal quoting of Matt Cutts comments over on sphinn, but I think it’s important to understand the ramifications of something like this:
“Where does Cutt’s and search engines stand on something like this?”
My quick take is that Google’s webmaster guidelines allow for cases such as this: “Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it.”
There’s not much more deceptive or misleading than a fake story without any disclosure that the story is hoax.
When Google has the ability to decide what information get presented and valued on the web with absolute and unquestioned authority, all because we trust them and they give us free tools and 25GB of free GMAIL space, we’ve sold them the internet for pile of magic beans.
Remember friends authoritarian dictatorships start by controlling what information the people get to see, hear, and read. It doesn’t matter if they are censoring jokes, or hoaxes today, what matters is they are going in and changing the rules of the game, midstream, just because they didn’t like the way things were turning out.
Don’t think hoax news stories have value, perhaps you should learn about Orson Wells and War of the Worlds. It’s easy to dismiss things like this as trivial today because maybe you agree with Google … but what happens when you are the one being censored … think Google will offer you a refund on those magic beans …