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Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Google Custom Search Blog Hacked?

The official Google Custom Search blog (as linked from the Google Blog) has a very strange post up today:

Google Custom Search, is the wonderful product from Google which many webmasters have been looking and dream for. It allows webmasters to create their own custom search engines to search only the sites he/she wants.

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.

I’ll cover up more on this powerful tool very soon in my next blog.

Good Luck for all the Custom Search customers(??).

Cheers,
Srikanth

Apart from grammar problems and misspellings of Google Products (like “Ad-sense”), the whole posts seems skewed in a funny, non-official direction. “Also,” as Ionut Alex. Chitu of Google Operating System who sent this in remarks, “all the posts from this blog were deleted.”

It wouldn’t be the first time an official Google Blog was hacked, or kidnapped due to a misconfiguration by a Google employee, as these two posts illustrate.

[Thanks Ionut!]

Update: Aaaannd... the blog is back to normal again. I’ve contacted Google to ask what happened and will update the post if there’s a reply.

Update 2: Google replied with a statement:

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 via the Blogger Help Center at http://www.blogger.com/problem.g. We can then investigate.

I’m not exactly sure what they mean... a blog that’s marked as spam gets all its content deleted and allows others to start blogging on it?

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