Friday, May 14, 2004

Google Ad Censorship

Unknown News tells the story of how their Google AdWords ad “Who would Jesus bomb? anti-war bumber stickers” got rejected, and after a heated email exchange was allowed in anyway.

Also see how Google censors German and French pages in their results to not confront local law.

Google Ad Censorship by Philipp Lenssen

Gmail Down

Gmail, which is still in Beta, has been down for the whole day for many people (including me). Though it happens on different browsers and machines, it does not happen to all people. One Orkut member who emailed the Gmail team at gmail-support@google.com got a reply back:

“Thank you for your report regarding the Gmail site being inaccessible. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. We are working to fix the problem, and expect that it will be corrected soon.”
– Gmail Team, 5/14/2004

Gmail Down by Philipp Lenssen

Google Graffiti

My recent experiment with attaching keywords to CNN.com made me think of a possible new Web sport: Google Graffiti. I will now try to spray “Kilroy Was Here” on a bunch of high-PR pages, which then should pop up for that phrase in Google:

• cnn.com/?-kilroy-was-here-
• ibm.com/?-kilroy-was-here-
• adobe.com/?-kilroy-was-here-
• microsoft.com/?-kilroy-was-here-
• yahoo.com/?-kilroy-was-here-
• apple.com/?-kilroy-was-here-
• w3.org/?-kilroy-was-here-
• real.com/?-kilroy-was-here-
• blogger.com/?-kilroy-was-here-
• macromedia.com/?-kilroy-was-here-
• intel.com/?-kilroy-was-here-

Google Graffiti by Philipp Lenssen

Yahoo to Offer 100 MB

“Wonder what sparked that idea?

Web portal Yahoo! will begin offering “virtually unlimited storage" for its paid email customers and will upgrade free users to 100MB.”
– Jim Hu, Yahoo! offers “unlimited” email storage (Silicon.com), May 14 2004

Yahoo to Offer 100 MB by Philipp Lenssen

Major Google Bug Fixed

Google actually allowed anyone to delete pages from their index. The first to fall was Microsoft.com, followed by Adobe.com – both of which then showed a PageRank of 0. The bug has been fixed by now.
Also see the Inquirer’s story on this. [Via Google Blog Dirson].

Update: Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch quotes Google – they confirmed 10 different sites were temporarily removed.

Major Google Bug Fixed by Philipp Lenssen

Google Toolbar Update

The Google Toolbar has been updated to version 2.0.111 and comes with better PageRank display reliability, as well as other miscellaneous fixes and improvements. [Via Abakus.]

Google Toolbar Update by Philipp Lenssen

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