Category: Of Note in Search Biz

This morning reports came streaming in that “Google was freaking out.” From a Slashdot thread:

“It looks like for the moment at least, all Google results are failing the malware checks and being listed with a warning ‘This site may harm your computer,’ including all pages from Google themselves. Users trying to visit pages at search results will only be able to proceed via manual manipulation of the search result link to remove the Google click-through (which is also broken). Until Google fixes this bug, it looks Google web search is useless.”



Other reports claimed that Gmail was also affected, from a mailing list I monitor:

Just fyi, the problem also affected any mail coming into Gmail, wrongly marking emails as spam and putting a big red warning flag on

them…..So check your spam folders.

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Like Dodgeball, Google Video Uploads, Jaiku, and Google Catalog, and … I am not keeping track. But this is the evidence of Sergey’s comment months ago that Google was doing too much…

In any case, I think the spin Google gave on Google Catalog’s closing is a bit …. well it’s spin. We all do it. Let’s revisit the launch of Google Catalog, courtesy Danny’s SEW, which was deep into reporting mode when Catalog launched. (Danny has moved on to SEL).

My first thought upon seeing the service was “Why?” Of all the things Google could choose to make searchable, why target mail order catalogs? Shopping-oriented searches do make up a significant chunk of any search engine’s queries, so launching some type of shopping search service does make sense. But why not instead target online merchant stores?

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For the past few years, but in particular in the past year, spammers, or one very focused spammer, have been posting bogus comments on Searchblog, hoping to leverage the authority of this community to promote a commerce site called oyuncambazi dot com. Well, here’s my response: oyuncambazi are spammers, spam, spam, spaaaaammmmmmers. Oyuncambazi = Spam. So please stop, Mr. Oyun. It’s tiresome and time consuming. STOP. Ideally, those wonderful Googlebots will pick up this post and start relating oyuncambazi with SPAM.

Update: I got an apology from someone for spamming, and a promise to not do it anymore. We’ll see!

Update 2: The person responsible claims to be a 17 year old from Turkey who, though it’s hard to understand his English, seems to be quite regretful. We’re trying to hav a conversation on email. He’s been doing this all over the web, clearly. Now this post is #2 on Google on a search for his site.

Remember the miserable failure GoogleBomb? It’s back, in a way, or it will be back. Danny Sullivan explains it here, and asks the Bush administration to fix it.



…in an inept attempt to defuse the Googlebomb, someone in Bush’s White House moved his biography to the page used by the current US president. That means when Bush goes, the next US president (Obama) inherits the problem

..Aside from turning Bush’s search engine problem into a legacy issue for future presidents, the change is also misleading the US public and others. The redirection from the old bio page should lead to the new bio page, not require those using old bookmarks to guess at where the new location is at.