Philipp Lenssen noticed recently that the Google Custom Search blog, maintained by Google, was “marked as spam”. It’s scary to see this happen to an official Google blog because if it can happen to them, there is absolutely nothing to stop it from happening to you. The official blog was replaced by a single post by “Srikanth” saying:

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.

Also Google Custom Search is integrated with Ad-sense, which means make money while keeping users on your site for longer time with custom search engine.

I’ll cover up more on this powerful tool very soon in my next blog.

Good Luck for all the Custom Search customers(??).

Cheers,
Srikanth

You could be writing a blog for months, following all the rules — then out of the blue Google could delete your blog and all it’s content, then let some random person start blogging on that very same domain.

Whoops! We accidentally classified ourselves as spam, and our ever-perceptive Blogger settings caught us. The Custom Search Blog has since been restored, and we’re taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen with other Google blogs in the future. Other Blogger users can make sure this doesn’t happen to them by reporting any problems to the Blogger support team via the Blogger Help Center at http://www.blogger.com/problem.g. We can then investigate.

Should this happen to you, contact Google immediately to explain the situation so they can investigate. It would be nice to have more clarification from Google about what actually happened here, and what happens when a blog is “marked as spam”. From this most recent demonstration, it appears your blog is completely deleted and put back into the list of available blog names — allowing anybody to register it. What can we possibly do to stop this from happening to innocent bloggers?

Google has publicly stated on several occasions that they are not interested in keeping users on their site — they want people to find information and leave Google as quickly as possible — but their latest move is a sign that Google is taking a second look at that strategy.

Instead of sending people to any site hosting content from Press Association, Associated Press, Canadian Press and Agence France-Presse, Google has decided to license articles and host them directly. The pages hosting the articles are plain — you get the article you want, and basically nothing else (not even ads).

This move has been in the making for several years — and frankly, it is hard to understand why it took so long. Google has the infrastructure to store these articles, and it gives them all kinds of flexibility they never had before. For example, they could add features such as live chat or comments on these hosted article pages if they wanted.

There is the possibility that other sites that host this same content will be slightly ticked off now that traffic coming from Google will completely disappear — potentially causing quite a bit of lost ad revenue. It will be interesting to see how Google handles the backlash when it happens.

Do you know about Google Updater? There is a good chance you have it installed on your computer already as it’s bundled with other Google products like the browser toolbar. Well, in what seems to be an obvious attempt to steal even more users away from Microsoft Office products, Google just added “StarOffice” to the the list of available downloads that can be installed and updated automatically through Google Pack. If you download it directly from Sun, it will cost you around $70, however Google appears to be giving it away for free — or at least there isn’t a nag screen or an obvious way to upgrade to a full version.

Web applications like Google Docs are very useful in many circumstances, but for power users who need, or prefer, a fat client to do their work — there was no real choice but to keep using Microsoft Office if they don’t know about this suite.

StarOffice, which includes their own version of Access, Excel, PowerPoint and Word, is developed by Sun — but Google has been throwing resources at it since October, 2005. I am going to assume there is a plugin under development that lets users create documents on their PC and synchronize them with their online counterpart through Google Docs. StarOffice already has hooks into Google’s search and desktop capabilities.

It should be interesting to see if this move helps Sun get more exposure for StarOffice. What do you think? Are you surprised Google made this product available through the Google Updater? Will this affect Microsoft in any way?

A lot of Google AdSense publishers are banned from the Google AdSense program for click fraud. Some of these Google AdSense publishers manage to get their AdSense account reinstated. However, majority of them failed to do so. As a result, they are banned from the Google AdSense program.

Google does not reveal any specific details on how they define click fraud. They do not disclose their proprietary click fraud detection technology as well. As a result of that, publishers would not be able to report any click fraud activities on their website.

However, Google does provide general definition of invalid clicks. It may be a good idea to learn how Google defines invalid clicks and how they detect click fraud.

Google defines invalid clicks as:

• Manual clicks intended to increase publisher’s advertising
• Clicks by automated tools, robots, or other deceptive software.

• Detection and filtering techniques: Each click on an AdSense ad is monitored by Google system. Google will record the IP of each click, the time of the click, duplicate clicks and various click patterns. Google will use these factors and filter out potential invalid clicks.

• Advanced monitoring techniques: Google uses its proprietary software to monitor click fraud activity. They are constantly working to improve their click fraud detection technology.

• The Google Team: In addition, Google has a team that uses specialized tools and techniques to examine individual case of click fraud. When Google system detects potentially invalid clicks, a member of this team will examines the affected account.