Google disables own blog as spam

Google may be getting a little overly zealous in its antispam efforts. The company says it accidentally disabled one of its own corporate blogs after mistaking it for spam.

Google Blogoscoped first reported the problem with Google's Custom Search blog. Apparently, the blog had an odd message full of misspellings and incorrect grammar that said:

"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. ? I?ll cover up more on this powerful tool very soon in my next blog." It was signed "Srikanth."

The blog is now back to normal, with no new posts since July 17. Here is the explanation from a Google spokesman as to what happened:

"Blogger's spam classifier misidentified the Custom Search Blog as spam. If a spammer gets caught by our automated classifier, the blog owner will receive notification of this identification. At the owner's request, the Blogger team will review the blog to verify that the blog in question isn't spam. In this case, the Custom Search Blog bloggers overlooked their notification, and after a period of time passed, the blog was disabled. The content wasn't deleted, but it was removed from the URL.

After the blog was disabled, the URL went back into rotation. A subsequent person came in, claimed the URL, and posted the new content about Google Custom Search, which was not an official post. So, it was a case of 'URL squatting' and not a security issue or any kind of hack.

Even after blogs are disabled as spam, the owner can write in requesting a review for her or his blog to be restored. If the review proves that the owner's content was not in fact spam, the blog will be restored with all content. So, when we saw what happened on Tuesday--and were well aware that our content wasn't spam--we restored the official Google Custom Search Blog. The individual who had claimed the URL and published the blog post in reference still has his content; it's just hosted at a new URL."

[dunnsanfrancisco]

Srikanth: Enroll in an English class

I guess the lesson to be learned in all this is that Srikanth, who writes on Google's Blogoscoped (http://blogoscoped.com/) should address the issue of his spelling and grammar. Either he has a blind proofreader or he hasn't learned enough English to write in a polished manner. His grammar and spelling was almost as bad as one sees in the average Nigerian scam letter. That's why Google's security system thought it was spam - the quality of Srikanth's language use was below acceptable standards.

[Pete Bardo]

It aint that bad!

Apart from the dangling preposition--a mistake native speakers often make--his grammar's not that bad. The punctuation is another matter, but it's hard to tell what punctuation he actually used. The question mark (?) usually indicates an unrecognized character. Some word processors distinguish between a single quote and an apostrophe. The single quote will have both an opening and a closing representation. Those characters, when appearing in an HTML document, will display as a question mark. Same is true for documents that use opening double quotes.

Blogging, in general, has lead to a degradation of acceptable English and grammar. I'm not endorsing poor writing, simply recognizing that it exists.

Dunnsanfrancisco's comments seem to assume Srikanth is not a native English-speaker. There are plenty of people named Pete or Joe--people who know no other language than English--who can't write or spell or properly punctuate. What's the big deal?

[Ilgaz]

Would you comment this if his name was "Johnson"?

So, you expect everyone who's native language is other than
English to be perfect?

In fact, some of tools you must be using are coded by people
not knowing anything else than "Thank you" or "Hello" in
English.

If you follow technical blogs, live with it.

[martini1179]

Ironic, actually ...

Not 15 minutes ago, I checked my Gmail and, for the first time, found one of my Google Alerts IN MY SPAM FOLDER. LOL.