Google's Tel Aviv office was to host a military tech conference in Israel, but scrubbed any internet record of it after being asked.

The Israeli Defense Tech Conference, aimed at tech companies working with the Israeli military, was scheduled for November at the Google for Startups campus in Tel Aviv.

The event, according to a listing posted on the event RSVP app Luma, was pitched at “founders, investors and innovators” looking to network and learn more about the defense tech space. It was co-sponsored by Google, Fusion Venture Capital, Genesis, a startup accelerator, and the Israeli military’s research and development arm, known as the Directorate of Defense Research and Development (DDR&D, or Ma’fat).

When The Intercept contacted Google, the event page disappeared.

Google was not only listed as the physical host of the event and one of its sponsors, but the event listing also included a notice that attendees “approve of sharing [their] details with the organizers (Fusion & Google)” as part of signing up.

When The Intercept contacted Google, as well as the other companies and venture capital firms on the event page, the event page disappeared.

  • Snot FlickermanEnglish
    30•13 hours ago

    https://www.meetup.com/fusion-la-israel/events/303578537/?eventOrigin=group_events_list

    The meetup page is still up but Google Startups has been stripped from the image.

    https://lu.ma/Israeli-Defense-Tech-Conf-Fusion-Google-Mafat

    Also, the original page still shows up in Google searches, but was not archived on archive.org and I have been unable to find Google’s cached version of the page. Although they obviously have a cached version since the text is visible as a preview of what’s on the page.

    Stay classy, Google.

      • Snot FlickermanEnglish
        9•13 hours ago

        I was under the impression you could still do a cache:url style search, but it seems impossible.

        They’re caching them, they’re just not sharing that with the public anymore. I know it has a cache because the Google result shows a bunch of text from the page that no longer exists. That “preview” text is pulled from a cache if the “new” page is resulting in a 404. I was hoping there some way for users to still access it, even if esoterically, but even those options seem unavailable.

        • @[email protected]English
          3•10 hours ago

          God, I hate that. I find search results all the time (that don’t involve google) that are now completely different :/

          Like… I was looking for that specific search.