Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Google
Google disables an official Google blog after deciding it was spam
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.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at Google Blogoscoped noticed that most of the content was missing from the Google Custom Search blog, and it had been replaced by a poorly worded description of Google's custom search feature.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.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
