Google Cache

So.. I like to be really honest here on the blog, and forthcoming about things that are going on and that I find interesting.

The short of it is, blogs can get you in hot water. I don't mention who I work for, but I have mentioned who the client is, and a few other tid bits of information that are in the public domain. Nothing that I have ever referenced has been "confidential", and in fact you can find it in newspapers and such.

But, recently I wrote something specific about a meeting I attended, and I referenced another company name. We'll call this company, "The Empire". Now, I don't work for the Empire, and I don't work for the organization that The Empire contracted to. I'm just a grunt observer that does my job and makes deadlines with time to spare.

Now, the company I work for has us do training programs and so on, some of it mandated by the organization that we support, and some by our company itself. It's all standard stuff that you'd find anywhere. This relatively new phenomenon of blogging has been noticed by my employer, and they sent out one of those little training videos that shows what's not proper to write about on public blogs. Basically, they are concerned about confidentiality - and I totally get that. I've never, and would never, write anything about any confidential subject. Like I said, I've only referenced broad themes in general ways for the most part.

So.. The Empire had a situation transpire, and I wrote about it on my blog. I looked at who's been reading my blog, and lo' and behold, somebody from The Empire did a google search for the exact relevant keywords and came to my blog to read about it. They've been looking nearly every day since then.

Hello person from The Empire Company - please don't make my life a living hell. I'm just a grunt.

So, anyway, I've read reports in the news about other people who write blogs getting in some deeeeep shit with their employers over things that are not relevant to their employment at all. The moral of the story is, what you think is the 1st amendment is not really "freedom of speech" at all. You can still get majorly messed with for just speaking your mind about politics, or culture, or religion - or observations that you make at work.

So, I thought.. well, it's not important for me to write about my job, and certainly not to use an actual company name or organization name while doing it. I was simply trying to relate observations I make about the way things work. So - in order to make sure that employee X at The Empire doesn't fling a massive amount of poo in my direction, I need to scrub my blog of all references to anything of that sort.

Problem is.. Google caches the pages. I deleted off the last mention I made of work last week, and just looked at the cache and it's still there. Ugh ugh ugh. If you did a search on the keywords again, google will not return my blog as a match, but I can see from the exit page that employee X at The Empire is still hitting the google cache for that post.

I thought that google would cache the updated version of the page, thus over writing that bit. Is that not how it works? There's basically no way to make a mistake go away once google caches it?