Download Squad

This is how you know you've got a problem with splogs (or spam blogs created for the sole purpose of making money through advertising or sales of often dubious products). Google accidentally disabled the Official Google Custom Search blog this morning after Google software identified the blog as spam.

Earlier this year, a highly publicized report suggested that as many as 3 out of 4 blogs hosted on Google's Blogspot could be splogs. Google's been stepping up their efforts to identify and disable those blogs. But either the company is being a bit too aggressive, or the folks working on this particular blog need to pay better attention to their inbox.

Once a blog is identified as spam, a message is sent to the author. If that person doesn't respond, the account can be suspended. And that's what happened in this case, because nobody had responded to the warnings.

Earlier today, Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped noticed that most of the content was missing from the Google Custom Search blog, and it had been replaced by a poorly worded description of Google's custom search feature. Eagle eyed readers will also note that the web site header was changed.

Lenssen wondered if the site had been hacked. It turns out that the truth was a bit stranger and funnier than fiction. Once the official blog had been suspended, someone swooped in and briefly took over the domain. Everything's back to normal now. But it makes us wonder if Google might want to prohibit users from snatching up disabled domain names until they've been down for at least a few weeks or months.