If you didn't already know, that dot "feature" applies to gmail addresses as well. You can send an email to you username with any number of dots in it.

Googling for PageTastic sites only returns a few sites:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apagetastic.com

Did they buy another small start up and rebrand their service?

No its not a start up. Thia is the internal domain which was used for testing. It points to www9.google.com, which also is owned by some databucket.com which is owned and registered by google-which makes it some sort of big internal infrastructure testbed for alpha based products and uncle and aunty test patterns.

Sorry for the typo and monologue-puounding a crackberry in a crowded train is not my strength :)-

The Googlist goes into great detail on Pagetastic:
http://thegooglist.blogspot.com/2006/02/google-page-creator-mirror-site-on.html

You also should see that :
http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.pagetastic.com

They made the decision in advance to limit the amount of signups, see press release at http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/pagecreator.html

"... knowledge of HTML or other computer programming languages ..."

Thanks Or, I'll update the post with that info.

Actually Alex writes on his blog "Well, the product i've been working on since I started Google has finally been released! Check out Google Page Creator" and Eric is a member of every officiall Google blog. It must be official one.

great link Philipp- I heard that it was databucket.com!!

Whew.. like tom comment..thats a real indepth analysis on that page -much more comprehensive then the chatter I was hearing..!!

strange, that google search returns so few results (2) for the search .pageastic.com!!

I only see , http://pzavislak.pagetastic.com/ and http://pzavislak.pagetastic.com/

how come that these two are crawled and indexed and the remain ..how many beta's created were not crawled and dsiplayed in the SERP ??

both sites have a lot of content and those are not beta content, they seem to be alpha players!!

Pd, from what I understand a Google engineer had the Google toolbar on while visiting a Pagetastic page to test it... so it got indexed even though it might not have been linked from anywhere (as it was not "live" yet). Indexing takes time, so I don't think those pages are from today or yesterday...

/Pd, you are surely on a "bad" DataCenter. Try this :
http://www.webrankinfo.com/outils/google-dance/google-dance3.php?q=site:pagetastic.com

Oh, incidentally, I speak about you /pd on zorgloob post :
http://www.zorgloob.com/2006/02/dj-des-problmes-avec-google-page.asp
happy? :-)

Merci Tom. Je ne parle pas français et le nom est Peter Dawson pas Paul Dawson :) -

yes and the webrank you refer to has duplicate SERP = 5 of which 3 are dups

Philipp: Yes, thats why I say that they must be the "relations" of googlers (the trusted family) But out of curoisty what does the google toolbar permit for the web page to be crawled ?? After all if its on the robot.txt then it will never be crawled correct ? (or rather not be crawled)!!

The robots.txt is empty so Google is allowed to crawl these...
http://sygyzy.pagetastic.com/robots.txt

... and as soon as they know the URL – which the Google toolbar sends back to headquarters if you enable the PageRank-checker – they can do so...

ahhhh ok I see . The "tool bar" speaks to the mothership also!!

The web is a crazy place, look what I did to hyves:

http://seweso.hyves.seweso.com/

But this doesn't work:

http://google.seweso.com/

http://seweso.pages.seweso.com/

There are many duplicate entry's in search engines because of this reason. Everybody should check the given url on the server ánd on the client (javascript). :D

/pd > oops, I write too quickly :) Mistake is rectified.

>>Added to that, Google allows you to add a dot anywhere in the sub-domain... meaning that philipp.lenssen.googlepages.com has the same content as phil.ipp.lenssen.googlepages.com – without any redirect. So, it looks like Google is creating a lot of duplicate content here. Corsin Camichel notes that Google is now definitely going against their own webmaster guidelines, which state: “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”>>

i'm finding out that this is no longer true.... dunno when it changed.