Last week, Google managed to delete one of its own blogs, after the search engine mistakenly though that it was a spam blog.
The site in question was Google’s Custom Search Blog, which offers advice for users of the company’s Custom Search Engine software, which can be used to build customized website that search specific sites or pages.
Bloggers spotted that something odd was going on when all the previous posts were deleted and replaced by a strange sounding post by someone called Srikanth, leading to speculation that the site had been hacked.
Srikanth wrote:
“Google Custom Search, is the wonderful product from Google which many webmasters have been looking and dream for. Also Google Custom Search is integrated with Ad-sense, which means make money while keeping users on your site for longer time with custom search engine…. Good Luck for all the Custom Search customers(??).”
Apparently, Google had managed to classify the blog as spam, and sent notification to the Custom Search team. Google’s typical response to spam blogs is to notify the webmaster to give them a chance to explain the problem and clear up any misunderstandings.
However, Google’s blog team failed to respond to this warning, so the blog was deleted, and the URL was made available to the general public, which is how Srikanth got hold of it.
Google later explained the mishap:
“Whoops! We accidentally classified ourselves as spam, and our ever-perceptive Blogger settings caught us. The Custom Search Blog has since been restored, and we’re taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen with other Google blogs in the future. Other Blogger users can make sure this doesn’t happen to them by reporting any problems to the Blogger support team.”
