(Mis)Uses of Technology

(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Carlo Longino


Filed Under:
spam, splogs

Companies:
google




Google Can't Figure Out That Its Own Blog Isn't Spam

from the whoops dept

Splogs have been a problem for a while now. Spammers set up sites full of content -- generally stolen from legitimate sites -- in order to grab search traffic and make money from ads or through other means. Blog platform providers don't want to waste resources supporting these sites, so many of them have some form of anti-splog system, including Google's Blogspot platform. But clearly they need more work, since Blogspot's marked an official Google blog as spam (via Infoworld), leading to its disappearance and the takeover of its URL by another blogger. Apparently the system's warning emails to the Google bloggers went unheeded, so after a period of time, the site was automatically taken down, and another blogger swooped in and grabbed the URL. The company realized what happened, and restored the site, but the episode highlights just how poorly anti-spam blog systems tend to work.

11 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 

Reader Comments (rss)

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  1. Anybody else noticed...

    by Lawrence D'Oliveiro - Aug 9th, 2007 @ 1:23am

    ...that "blogspot" is an anagram of "splogbot"?

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  2. Re: Anybody else noticed...

    by lbsterling - Aug 9th, 2007 @ 3:05am

    No, but your name anagrams pretty well too!

    -A Cowed Virile Loner

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  3. Re: Re: Anybody else noticed...

    by Squeaky - Aug 9th, 2007 @ 3:38am

    Harsh but damned funny

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  4. huh?

    by MEoip - Aug 9th, 2007 @ 4:37am

    Let me get this straight Google's spam bot removed their blog so the spam bot is broken.
    Wait... It appears that Google didn't answer the email they were sent or bother to log into blogger and see they were a suspected splog. So I'm guessing like many folks they use some sort of app that posts from Word or OO or somewhere else. This ain't the bots fault it's the blogger's fault for not paying attention or logging into his/her blog.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  5. Everything worked perfectly

    by icon Jim (profile) - Aug 9th, 2007 @ 6:07am

    if the site was not being maintained and simply feed news so that people would visit.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  6. Re: Re: Anybody else noticed...

    by anagrammer - Aug 9th, 2007 @ 6:21am

    it could be "Weirdo or evil clean" as well.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  7. Re:

    by Nathan Weinberg - Aug 9th, 2007 @ 9:21am

    Also, this episode highlights just how poorly Googlers respond to email.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  8. Har Har

    by Neal - Aug 9th, 2007 @ 9:32am

    I couldn't help but laugh. Google identifies one of it's own blogs as spam and deletes it but it can't seem to recognize the (seemingly) 90% of blogspot blogs that actually are spam blogs to delete them (or remove them from its blog search).

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  9. Re: Re:

    by Anonymous Coward - Aug 9th, 2007 @ 10:10am

    Not really. It highlights how one person failed to respond to emails.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  10. by Anonymous Googler - Aug 9th, 2007 @ 5:22pm

    sorry, the email must have come in while i was taking my daily chateau y'quem bath or while i was lighting a pre-castro cuban with a $1,000 bill.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  11. Google Judgments

    by A Key - Nov 28th, 2007 @ 9:57am

    The bigger the dog, the more chance it will bite its own tail. It's inevitable.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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