Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Readers of Google's Custom Search Blog were handed a bit of a surprise Tuesday when the Web site was temporarily removed from the blogosphere and hijacked by someone unaffiliated with the company.The problem? Google had mistakenly identified its own blog as a spammer's site and handed it over to another person.
The answer turned out to be less sinister, according to Sean Carlson, a Google spokesman."Blogger's spam classifier misidentified the Custom Search Blog as spam," he said via e-mail on Wednesday.
[pcworld.com...]
Not the same blog, but a somewhat similar foul-up. Talk about collateral damage!
Let's call this what it is.
**Google's product is so inherently flawed in spotting spam that it even removes their own content**
Now, can we stop playing kissy-kissy with Google's spin on this story and get to the underlining and much more relevant subtext?!
I can state for a fact that i've seen this happen to several clients with even DMOZ-listed blogs and so-called warning emails that were answered and still the blogs were deleted.
What's the sense of sending out emails which are basically real spam as apparently no one reads them?
Of course, they couldn't retrieve the back-end data.
(they certainly had no problem finding their own)
Search results are getting worse, relevance is getting worse, more and more Adsense only sites are showing up high, while Google deletes it's own blog.
Is a pattern forming here?
In every project or enterprise, it eventually reaches the point where it becomes totally unmanageable. The US government reached that point about 30 years ago, now it looks like it is Google's turn :P
[edited by: Wlauzon at 4:20 am (utc) on Aug. 9, 2007]
More and more lately it seems like Google is losing the edge in SE's.
A relative term. Who are they losing their edge to?
If someone would step up to the plate, perhaps. Unfortunately, I do not see any of the other players doing so. Is Y better? MS? Ask? Ha! We could only hope.
Gigablast is as good as any of the major competitors.
G's reliance on links has corrupted the net. Until someone comes up with a better idea, well, where we are is where we are...
It's always been good advice to use your own domain name and host your webpages yourself. The only serious webmasters that might be advised to use blogspot are the black hats. Hence the overactive spam detection maybe.
Surely this is nothing to do with search.
Have you seen the endless -950 penalty threads?...
IF google is an living organism, it has the equivalent of AIDS. The "good protector" cells overrating and attacking the entire body indiscriminately instead of only the "bad" organisms.
The only serious webmasters that might be advised to use blogspot are the black hats
Unfortunately, this is the same thinking that goes on at the Plex.
The "serious" blackhatters left blogspot nearly a year ago. (or have devised ways to keep their blogs under the radar)
Only wannabes blackhatters and hundreds of thousands regular people just wanting to write stuff for their 2 friends to read, get affected by Googs self-attacking virus.
Goog, always a day late when it comes to keeping up with the real culprits.
The only spoiler is the fact that it's brought out all the usual 'google bashers' and prophets of doom; No, kidz, one error - however silly - does not mean Google is dead, or even has a head cold.
Try to learn this: Google will not fall until someone comes up with something better.
Sorry to rain on your parade just as you were warming up ;)
PS - Correct me if I'm wrong, but M$ survived the hotmail blip, as I recall - and we all know Bill is the D**** himself :)
[edited by: Quadrille at 9:02 am (utc) on Aug. 9, 2007]
Goog, always a day late when it comes to keeping up with the real culprits.
Try to learn this: Google will not fall until someone comes up with something better....
A year ago we got about 3-5% of our sales from MSN.
In the past 3 months it is over 15%.
While that obviously does not mean the sky is falling, it indicates to me that more people are using MSN Live search. And personally, I usually get more relevant results from MSN Live than from Google or Yahoo.
To some small extent, Google may have shot itself in the foot with Adsense. It created Adsense with the idea that sites would run a few Adwords. But what has happened is that now one of the big problems with doing a search on Google is that sometimes the results are filled with MFA sites.
[edited by: Wlauzon at 4:55 pm (utc) on Aug. 9, 2007]
